Soroush in Ghouchani’s Frame

Why did criticism of Soroush become a judgment of Soroush?

Mohammad Ghouchani’s article criticizing Abdolkarim Soroush can be examined from various angles, but before entering into the details, it may be necessary to attend to a fundamental question: when reconstructing and criticizing a thinker’s intellectual record, is there a sufficient proportion between the evidence and the interpretation offered of it? Criticism of an idea requires reconstructing the thinker’s view in its most precise and fairest form, taking account of its historical and conceptual context, assessing its relation to that thinker’s other works and positions, and then showing where it has erred, become contradictory, or led to unjustified consequences.

From this perspective, one important question about Ghouchani’s article concerns the degree of bias in selecting and juxtaposing evidence. The article places statements and positions from different periods of Soroush’s intellectual life alongside one another in order to produce a portrait of him. Examining a thinker’s intellectual development over time is, of course, entirely legitimate; the issue is whether the selected evidence is sufficient to establish these developments and support the article’s conclusions, or whether other evidence and contexts that might yield a different picture have received less attention. Ghouchani’s article begins to go wrong at precisely this point. He links Soroush to the Sufi tradition, opposition to technology, neo-Marxism, authoritarianism, and ultimately a kind of hidden totalitarianism, concluding that what had been regarded in recent decades as religious liberalism was nothing more than liberalism in disguise.

One of the central strands of Ghouchani’s argument for doubting Soroush’s liberal credentials is the set of positions he has taken on technology and contentment. Ghouchani places this discussion within a broader claim: in his view, Soroush has recently begun to speak in the language of the left and represents an instance of the neo-Marxist wave against neoliberalism. In Ghouchani’s argument, Soroush’s remarks on capital-liberalism, consumption, contentment, and technology are placed together to demonstrate this departure from liberalism. To assess this argument, however, it is better to distinguish technology from contentment.

Technology is first and foremost a discussion about technology and its relation to human life. Ghouchani rightly relies on Soroush’s explicit statements: that human perfection should not be sought in greater consumption, production, and competition; and, most explicitly, that he says, “The best technology is no technology,” even asking, “Why the metro?” and proposing that Tehran’s traffic problem should not be solved by building a metro. These are serious and contestable positions, and they cannot simply be passed over.

Yet criticism of these positions must proceed on the same level at which Soroush himself has posed the question: the philosophy of technology and the relation between technical progress and the good life. One may ask whether Soroush has sufficiently considered the costs of underdevelopment, the benefits of technology, and the necessities of urban life, and whether recommendations such as opposition to the metro are defensible in terms of public welfare and urban policy. These could constitute a serious critique of his view of technology. But the distance between such criticism and the conclusion that Soroush is anti-development must be traversed by argument. The mere fact that a thinker is pessimistic about certain consequences of technology does not mean that he possesses an anti-development economic or political theory.

Contentment, however, is another matter. Here Ghouchani focuses on Soroush’s more recent remarks about consumerist life, contentment, and refraining from buying luxury goods, placing these positions alongside his critique of capital-liberalism. Ghouchani’s evidence in this section is also real, and Soroush clearly defends simple living and limiting consumption. Thus, the basis for criticizing these positions is entirely clear.

Nevertheless, one must not overlook an important distinction—one of which Ghouchani himself is fully aware: capitalism and liberalism are not synonymous concepts. A critique of capitalism does not necessarily amount to a critique of liberalism in its broader sense. Even if we accept that Soroush criticizes certain aspects of capitalism, it must still be shown exactly which foundations of liberalism he rejects.

Here, Soroush’s own explicit statement is particularly important. He says, “I do not present contentment as an economic system,” and emphasizes that he has no particular economic system and is not an “economic theorist.” Ghouchani quotes this statement, but immediately sidelines it within his critical framework with expressions such as “pole,” “spiritual master,” “shaykh,” and “the spiritual guide of Soroushism,” noting that despite this explicit clarification, Soroush speaks of promoting contentment and simple living.

Two claims must be distinguished here: (a) Soroush offers an ethical and social recommendation in favor of contentment. (b) Soroush promotes an economic theory. The first is clearly supported by Soroush’s words, but the second requires a separate argument. That Soroush wishes to promote simple living, even if he extends this recommendation to public policy, does not in itself show that he has an economic theory opposed to liberalism—let alone that one can infer from this that he is a neo-Marxist.

Moreover, the article “Technology and Contentment” cannot be understood apart from the era in which it was written. It belongs to the 1980s: a period in which Iran was confronting revolution, war, a state-run economy, confiscations, and crises arising from the transition from tradition to modernity. It was a period in which many of today’s domestic liberals were either leftists, thought as Soroush did, or were practicing dissimulation. This historical context neither justifies Soroush’s errors nor prevents their criticism, but it matters for understanding precisely what problem he was grappling with in that article. Even if we consider his recommendation concerning the metro entirely mistaken, we cannot directly infer from it that Soroush had an anti-development economic programme in mind.

Overall, the principal disagreement with Ghouchani is not a denial of his evidence, but concerns the level of conclusion drawn from it. On technology, Ghouchani has evidence showing Soroush’s pessimism about certain aspects of technology; but to turn that pessimism into an anti-development theory, he must show the theoretical links between these positions and a coherent view of economic and social development. On contentment, the evidence shows that Soroush criticizes consumerism and certain aspects of capitalism; but to establish his distance from the liberal tradition, and especially to label him a neo-Marxist, it must be made clear exactly which principles of liberalism this criticism targets and how it relates to his other economic and political positions.

From this perspective, technology and contentment may be regarded as two serious entry points for criticizing Soroush, but not as two ready-made pieces of evidence for proving a predetermined conclusion. In technology, Soroush’s position takes shape primarily as a philosophical question about technology. In contentment, too, his discussion is more an ethical recommendation about consumption and lifestyle than the presentation of an economic system. One may disagree with both positions and even show that Soroush did not offer sufficient economic argument when translating these ethical judgments into social recommendations. But these positions themselves are by no means sufficient to establish Ghouchani’s larger claim that Soroush has wholly departed from the liberal tradition or become a neo-Marxist.

Another issue is the relation between cultural and political freedoms on the one hand and economic liberalism on the other. This question is important in itself, but the conclusion Ghouchani draws from it does not necessarily follow from its premises.

First, two claims must be distinguished. Soroush does not claim to accept every aspect of liberalism; he regards liberalism as having economic, political, and cultural dimensions, and then explicitly states that, if these dimensions are separated, he is entirely liberal with respect to cultural freedoms. Clearly, one cannot infer from this that Soroush regards himself as a defender of every aspect of liberalism, including every interpretation of economic liberalism; nevertheless, neither can one easily infer from his remarks that he is hostile to economic liberalism.

It is clear that liberalism, in the history of ideas, has never been a wholly integrated and disagreement-free system. Disputes over the limits of the market, levels of taxation, social security, the distribution of wealth, and the role of the state in the economy have often been disputes within the liberal tradition itself. Therefore, if Ghouchani believes that accepting cultural and political freedoms without simultaneously accepting economic freedom is theoretically impossible, that is itself an important claim requiring proof. Such a conclusion cannot simply be presumed in advance through a maximalist and indivisible definition of liberalism, nor can its burden of proof be set aside merely by saying that “liberalism is not a restaurant menu.”

Even if we assume that Soroush does not in fact accept economic liberalism, this premise still does not readily establish that he is illiberal, much less that he is a neo-Marxist. If Ghouchani’s claim is that liberalism is an indivisible theoretical package and that accepting some of its components without accepting all of them is logically impossible, he must prove that very claim and remain committed to its implications. For example, if someone, unlike Soroush, accepted economic liberalism but did not agree with certain of its cultural or political aspects, would Ghouchani still be willing to exclude that person from the camp of liberalism?

The issue becomes more important because the umbrella of liberalism in the history of ideas is broad enough to encompass a diverse range of schools and thinkers. From Locke, Montesquieu, and Smith to Mill, Hayek, and Rawls, different understandings of liberty, the state, the market, justice, and the relation between the individual and society have emerged. Locke’s liberalism is not identical to Mill’s, just as Hayek’s liberalism differs fundamentally from Rawls’s; yet these differences do not prevent us from locating them all within the scope of the liberal tradition. Ghouchani, however, in defending his maximalist reading of liberalism, draws the boundaries of this tradition so narrowly that many thinkers who have been placed within the liberal tradition over recent centuries can scarcely fit his definition.

This point is also worth considering in light of Ghouchani’s own description of Soroush’s narrow definition of liberalism. The disagreement here may be less about a merely economic position than about how the boundaries and components of liberalism are to be defined. If someone accepts some of those components while criticizing others, must that person be regarded as outside the circle of liberalism? An affirmative answer requires argument. Otherwise, the discussion is reduced to a simple binary: either acceptance of every component Ghouchani considers necessary, or exclusion from liberalism and, subsequently, the attachment of the label neo-Marxism. Such a binary, at least in judging Soroush’s intellectual position, simplifies the issue rather than clarifying it.

The same issue appears in the discussion of Popper and Hayek. Ghouchani cites Soroush’s remarks about these two thinkers and their relation to liberalism, concluding that Soroush prefers Popper to Hayek—which, in my view, is a correct conclusion—but then calls this preference into question by referring to Hayek’s influence on Popper. Serious criticisms may be raised about the intellectual relation between Popper and Hayek or about Soroush’s accuracy in explaining their economic views; if Ghouchani believes that Soroush has made a theoretical error in preferring Popper to Hayek, he should demonstrate the error itself, rather than reduce the matter to his own expression of admiration for Hayek.

The same problem is evident in the discussion of social democracy. Quoting Soroush’s remark that “If only social democracy were possible, but alas, it is not,” Ghouchani attempts to show that Soroush is a wishful thinker, then responds: “Social democracy is indeed possible and has also been realized within liberal democracy.”

But here, too, one must ask what Soroush means by “not possible.” Does he mean that all welfare states are historically impossible? If so, this is an empirical claim, and one can discuss it quite simply with historical examples, in Ghouchani’s own manner. But if he means that the components of social democracy are theoretically incompatible, that is another matter. Rather than clarifying this distinction, Ghouchani employs the sentence in service of a conclusion he has already reached.

Indeed, one weakness of Ghouchani’s article is that many of Soroush’s sentences, instead of being examined as context-bound propositions requiring interpretation, are arranged like pieces of a dossier, as though each sentence were meant to serve as evidence for a conclusion known from the outset. Had Soroush considered social democracy possible, it would not have been unlikely that the same method could have been used to reach the opposite conclusion—the impossibility of social democracy!

Among the various parts of the article, Ghouchani’s criticism of Soroush’s positions on the Cultural Revolution may be among its most serious sections. In an interview cited by Ghouchani, Soroush still defends the principle of dismissing certain professors and says that at the time he agreed with the idea of “purging,” and that even now he believes that, under certain conditions, professors who are not good can be dismissed from the university. This position of Soroush’s can and should be taken seriously, and difficult questions should be raised about it. But even here Ghouchani goes a step further. Given the semantic burden of the word “purging” during the Cultural Revolution, using the term and extending it to Soroush’s current positions requires greater care. In this section, Ghouchani seeks to place Soroush’s past and present positions on a single continuum and concludes that Soroush still retains the outlook of the Cultural Revolution period. He therefore writes: “Soroush always wants the university in the dock—whether on the charge of not being revolutionary or on the charge of illicitly taking a salary.”

But in this account, part of Soroush’s statement that matters for understanding his meaning receives less attention. Soroush explicitly says that today a professor should not be dismissed from the university merely for “not being revolutionary.” As for what he calls “illicitly taking a salary,” regardless of how appropriate we consider the expression, he is referring to professors who, in his own explicit account, have allowed the university to decline, wronged the university and its students, taken on multiple posts, failed to perform their teaching duties, and nevertheless received university salaries. If Ghouchani were to tip his hat a little higher, he would probably accept that professors with such characteristics should be held accountable in any reputable university system and, if misconduct is established, even dismissed from the university.

One may disagree with Soroush’s criteria and language here, and even ask whether such expressions could lead to a dangerous practice in evaluating professors. But merely because he uses the language of a court or purging, without attending to the subject of which he is speaking, one cannot attribute to his present position the same meaning Ghouchani infers from it. A fortiori, one cannot readily conclude from Soroush’s defense of purging the university that he has arrived at a progressive reactionism. For such a judgment, Ghouchani must show that this position is part of a coherent Soroushian theory of the university, power, and government.

The article’s greater problem emerges where criticism of Soroush becomes entangled with judgment of his character. In parts of the article, Ghouchani discusses Soroush’s private life in the United States, his use of a broom, and drying clothes in the sun. Here the article takes a meaningful distance from criticism of ideas. What significance does the fact that Soroush dries his clothes in the sun have for political philosophy? What does it establish about his relation to liberalism that he owns a vacuum cleaner but sometimes cleans his home with a hand broom? Does the fact that he spent two nights among the Amish and liked their way of life establish that an Amish society is his ideal?

These details may be appealing in a biography, but they are almost irrelevant to the criticism of an idea. The very quotation Ghouchani provides shows that Soroush regards drying clothes in the sun and using less electricity as examples of technology and contentment. One may disagree with this outlook and even consider it simplistic; but its criticism must remain at that level, rather than turning a personal lifestyle into evidence for a political and economic theory. Beyond this, expressions such as “the height of Soroush’s struggle in America is washing his clothes” reduce the discussion from criticism of a view to belittlement of a person.

The same approach can be seen in the discussion of Soroush’s interest in India, China, and the Amish. From Soroush’s interest in a simpler way of life, Ghouchani constructs a picture of his utopia or ideal city; whereas even if Soroush’s image of these societies is simplistic, praising certain aspects of their lifestyle does not in itself show that he proposes them as his preferred model. Turning such an interest into a theory requires further links of argument.

At the end of Ghouchani’s article, the issue of religious intellectualism is likewise turned into a sweeping verdict: that religious intellectualism has reached the end of the road. This statement could itself be the subject of an independent article, but one must ask what “the end” means. Mr. Ghouchani may like or dislike religious intellectualism. He may wish for this intellectual current to come to an end or not; but declaring the end of religious intellectualism requires argument. If the intention is the end of a particular historical project, that may be open to discussion; but if the intention is the end of the possibility of religious reconsideration by intellectuals, this is an expansive claim that the evidence presented in the article is wholly incapable of sustaining. On what basis can the end of a current that has managed to change and endure over decades be announced in a sweeping judgment? One may nevertheless retain the optimistic assumption that by the end of religious intellectualism, Ghouchani means the end of one form of it and the emergence of another.

But the greatest conceptual leap in Ghouchani’s article occurs at its end, where he says that he once regarded Soroush as the Martin Luther of Islam, but has now discovered that he is John Calvin. Apart from the fact that such an analogy would require a much more precise argumentative path through the theology, political thought, and historical contexts of the two thinkers, the Calvin–Luther binary itself is not as simple and clear as it is assumed to be here.

Luther cannot be considered a suitable counterpart to Calvin merely because he stood against papal authority and certain ecclesiastical structures, nor can this difference be reduced to a simple binary between a tolerant reformer and a religious despot. From this perspective, Ghouchani’s analogy requires an account of his understanding of Luther and Calvin before it proves anything about Soroush. Still, there is no denying that the differences between Luther and Calvin regarding religion and political power are real and important. If Calvin here serves as a metaphor for religious despotism, it must be shown exactly in which theory of religion, power, and government Soroush—given the emphasis and costs he has borne for religious pluralism—comes close to Calvin. The mere fact that Soroush defended the Cultural Revolution at one time or took positions on some political questions that were close to those of authoritarians is not enough for such an analogy. If Soroush is to be compared with Calvin, it must be shown what theory of religious government he holds from which a form of authoritarian political order can be derived.

If, rather than drawing on Soroush’s recent and extensive lecture series on “Religion and Power,” “Religious Wayfaring in the Modern World,” and “The Relation between Science and Religion,” Ghouchani takes most of his evidence from Soroush’s remarks on contentment, technology, the Cultural Revolution, and the Amish, and then suddenly arrives at Calvin, he naturally cannot bridge this argumentative gap. Indeed, Soroush’s strength may be found in his positions on the relation between religion and power. It appears that, just as Ghouchani acknowledges that he wrongly regarded Soroush as the Luther of Islam a few years ago, regarding Soroush as Calvin may now be an even graver error; as though Ghouchani has reached an emotional judgment in reaction to his earlier error in calling Soroush Luther, rather than relying on a theoretical argument in this analogy.

Soroush may genuinely have thought in authoritarian terms in some of his political positions, but this claim is not the same as the proposition “Soroush is Calvin.” The latter requires demonstrating a theoretical relation between theology, his conception of religious truth, the structure of power, and government—not merely placing several political positions alongside one another and then attaching Calvin’s name to them.

In addition to all of the foregoing, it is necessary to distinguish between a thinker’s principal field of expertise and his statements in other fields. Soroush is known above all as a philosopher of religion and a philosopher of science and, by his own account, has for years sought to distance himself from the day-to-day affairs of politics. Thus, although his views on economics and politics may be subject to criticism, his statements in these fields cannot, without regard for this distinction, serve as the principal measure for judging his intellectual record. Just as one cannot judge a skilled psychologist as an authority in economics and politics merely because he holds views on those subjects, one must likewise distinguish, in Soroush’s case, between the principal domain of his intellectual work and his statements in other fields.

One of the structural problems with Ghouchani’s article, in my view, is that it fails to draw a clear distinction among three different levels: criticizing a proposition, criticizing a theory, and judging an intellectual figure. A proposition advanced by Soroush may be false without providing conclusive grounds for rejecting the entire theory; a theory may be weak without invalidating his entire intellectual record; and Soroush may have made a political error at a particular point without his entire intellectual identity being reduced to that error. Even the existence of contradictions among some of his views is not, in itself, sufficient to warrant conclusions such as that he was a liberal in disguise. Reaching such judgments requires a much more substantial chain of argument. Fairness in criticism means reconstructing the thinker under scrutiny in such a way that, were he himself present in the room, he could not say: you distorted what I said.

Indeed, if Soroush really does have a weak theory, it should be presented in its strongest possible form and then criticized. If he is genuinely anti-liberal, let us identify his anti-liberal premises; if he is genuinely a neo-Marxist, let us show which Marxist premises he has accepted; if he is genuinely anti-development, let us reconstruct his alternative theory of development; if he is genuinely totalitarian, let us reconstruct his theory of power and government; and if he really is Calvin, let us show in which of his political and theological theories a Calvinist mechanism lies embedded. But if we cannot demonstrate any of these things and instead resort to clothes dried in the sun, a hand broom, the Amish, China and India, and a few statements from the 1980s, then we have not really criticized Soroush; we have merely constructed a story about him.

Ghouchani’s article can also be seen as evidence of an important change in his relationship to Soroush. He once regarded Soroush as one of the most important figures of religious liberalism; now he describes that same figure as a liberal in disguise. There is nothing inherently wrong with changing one’s position. A scholar is entitled to reconsider his own past and even conclude that his earlier judgments were mistaken. But revising one’s judgment of a thinker should not entail rewriting that thinker’s past in such a way that all evidence contrary to the new conclusion is omitted or downplayed. Under such circumstances, a profusion of references does not necessarily signify depth of argument. Even 100 quotations may be placed side by side while the conclusion remains the product of selective choice.

I am certain that serious criticisms can be made of Soroush’s ideas, but Ghouchani’s profusion of barbs and sarcastic labels—from “the sheikh of religious intellectualism” and “the elder of the Soroushian order” to “the regime’s philosopher,” “the pole of Iran’s Sufi intellectualism,” and the attribution to him of the role of government ideologue—overshadows those criticisms. It might be useful for Ghouchani himself to submit to the same method he has used to criticize Soroush: would he be willing, instead of having his ideas criticized through reasoned argument, to be described by someone with a few unfair labels such as “liberal in disguise,” “follower of the Tabatabaian order,” or “Hayek-obsessed,” and then have those labels made the basis for judging his intellectual record by searching through Ghouchani’s works and patching together evidence? Can one construct an overall portrait of Ghouchani—a man who has spent a lifetime writing and has paid a price for his ideas and writings—by selecting a few sentences from different periods of his life, a few personal behaviors, a few historical judgments, and a few political positions?

In other words, Ghouchani has personalized the discussion to such an extent that the credibility of his important claims that Soroush is a “neo-Marxist,” a “Calvin,” or a “latent totalitarian” has been substantially undermined. In the portrait Ghouchani draws of Soroush, he has remained steadfast over the past five decades in his negative positions and attitudes, while, conversely, some of the positive positions he once held have gradually shifted toward negative ones. Such a dark and one-sided portrait of Soroush deserves serious reflection.

In constructing this portrait, Ghouchani does not even refrain from repeated digressions and from juxtaposing relevant and irrelevant material. It is unclear, for example, what relevance the discussion of Seyyed Javad Tabatabai has to the overall framework of the critique of Soroush. The reader may suspect that here too, just as with his expression of admiration for Hayek, Ghouchani has not passed up the opportunity to digress to Tabatabai in order to express his admiration for him; but it is unclear how far such admiration can justify Ghouchani’s implicitly accusing Soroush of making a false statement about Tabatabai.

Defending fairness in the criticism of Soroush is not a defense of Soroush; it is a defense of the principle that judgment of a thinker should be based on an examination of his works, arguments, historical context, and intellectual development, rather than on selecting a number of propositions and positions and arranging them together in order to reach a predetermined conclusion.

Source: Tejarat-e Farda Weekly, special issue, The Cost of War, 31 Mordad 1405