Mark Steyn: One nation under God

The other day, the guy on my local radio station mentioned that The Passion of The Christ was the Number One movie in America. ‘So congrats to Mel Gibson,’ he said. ‘And it’ll probably hold on to the Number One slot until the new Starsky & Hutch opens.’

It’s always useful to keep things in proportion. But, in fact, Starsky & Hutch opened and The Passion cleaned its clock. Last weekend, it took in $51.4 million, as against S&H’s $29.05 million. By then, The Passion’s total gross was up around $212 million. Pace my radio guy, mid-Seventies nostalgia is no threat to early first-century nostalgia. It’s true that, as the critic Stanley Crouch likes to point out, nothing is that popular. If ten million people see a movie, you’ll make 80 million bucks, and 97 per cent of the American public won’t even have to be involved. But I think it’s reasonable to say that, strictly in Hollywood terms, Mel Gibson has a huge smash on his hands. I would expect the week-on-week fall-off rate to be slower than most movies, including The Lord of the Rings, and the DVD sales to be colossal.

In the United States, that is. Britain and Europe are another matter. Leaving aside for the moment the question of anti-Semitism, the most notable characteristic of the negative reviews is a metropolitan condescension that Mel Gibson has had the bad taste to make a religious movie about a Jesus who isn’t an Episcopalian social worker with enlightened views on women, gay marriage, and so forth. Jesus, they assure us, is about ‘love’, not ‘violence’. Fine. Make your own Jesus movie. But this is the one Mel wanted to make, and it seems there are many millions of Americans prepared to sit through an R-rated movie in Aramaic and Latin on Christ’s suffering.

In Britain, I’ll bet, those of an Anglican sensibility will find it all a bit strong meat, and the godless masses will ignore it, and on the Continent Mel’s fellow Catholics, having wiggled free of their Church in little more than a generation, will have no desire to be reminded of what they’re missing. At the European box-office, Starsky & Hutch stands a good chance of clobbering The Passion. If so, this movie will join that select group of cultural markers that separate Europe from ‘Bush’s America’. I say ‘Bush’s America’ because even though, at least in his impeachment period, Bill Clinton had hordes of ‘spiritual advisers’ and was on a permanent touring circuit of ‘prayer breakfasts’ and had his press secretary issue press releases on which psalms he was studying during the impeachment trial and ostentatiously carried his Bible in his hand on any number of occasions — including the Easter Day service, after which he went back to the Oval Office to observe the resurrection in a more personal sense with his trusty intern — despite all that, it’s George W. Bush’s religiosity that seems to have got under Europe’s skin.

As Max Hastings wrote in the Guardian, ‘It is hard not to hate George Bush. His ignorance and conceit, his professed special relationship with God, invite revulsion.’ Just for the record, he does not claim a ‘special relationship’ with God, just a relationship. But to secular Europe, where fewer and fewer profess any sort of relationship with the Big Guy, even that modest claim is enough for them to lump him in the same category as his near neighbours in Texas, the incinerated cultists of Waco. Malcolm Fraser, the former Australian prime minister and like Sir Max a nominal conservative, calls the Bush administration ‘fundamentalist’. If one had to distil into one sentence the contempt that Britain’s great thinkers have for Tony Blair, it would be from Jeremy Paxman’s interrogation about the Prime Minister’s relationship with the President: ‘Do you pray together?’ The studio audience sniggered.

America is the last religious nation in the Western world, the last in which a majority of the population are practising believers and regular attenders of church (or synagogue, or mosque). So Bush praying is only a joke to foreigners like Pax’n’Max. No Democratic candidates have been suicidal enough to mock him on those grounds, and even in the party’s more decadent precincts it’s understood that the hard math of electoral politics requires campaigners at least not to appear ungodly. God-wise, to the American people, Bush is normal, not weird. Going to church is normal. Going to Bible study is normal. Buying albums of sacred songs by country singers is normal.

Anti-Americanism makes strange bedfellows. The Arab Islamists despise America because it’s all lap-dancing and gay-phone sex; Europe’s radical secularists despise America because it’s all born-again Christians hung up on abortion. They’re both right. The free market enables Hustler to thrive. And the free market in churches enables religion to thrive. In Europe, the established church, whether formal (the Church of England) or informal (as in Catholic Ireland, Italy and Spain), killed religion as surely as state ownership killed the British car industry. When the Episcopal Church degenerates into a bunch of wimpsville self-doubters, Americans go elsewhere. When the Church of England undergoes similar institutional decline, Britons give up on religion entirely.

‘When men cease to believe in God,’ said Chesterton, ‘they do not believe in nothing; they believe in anything!’ The anything most of the Western world’s non-believers believe in is government: instead of a state church, Europe believes in the state as church — the purveyor of cradle-to-grave welfare will provide daycare for your babies and take your aged parents off your hands. The people are happy to have cast off the supposed stultifying oppressiveness of religion for a world in which the state regulates every aspect of life. The French government’s recent headscarf ban — which, in the interests of an ecumenical fig-leaf, is also a ban on yarmulkes and ‘large’ crucifixes — seems the way of the future, an attempt to push all religion to the fringes of life. A couple of years back, a Canadian ‘human rights commission’, in its ruling that a Christian printer had illegally discriminated against a gay group by turning down a printing job for pro-gay literature, said he had the right to his religious beliefs in his own home but he had to check them at the door when he left for work in the morning. Who’s in the closet now?

Last year, I had a long talk with a ‘senior EU official’ and I was amazed at the way, quite unprompted, he used the phrase ‘Europe’s post-Christian future’, presuming that I would agree with him that this was a condition to aspire to. Europe’s quite post-Christian enough, and most of the horrors of our time came about through the most prominent expressions of its post-Christian state, Nazism and Communism. And yet faith in secularism is indestructible. The other day a correspondent emailed a swipe at me by the Independent’s Johann Hari in a vain effort to goad me into swiping back. Mr Hari was discussing the term ‘Islamofascism’: ‘It has been picked up by some people, like the vile Mark Steyn, who seem to think that all Islam is evil. I dislike all religions and would happily see the whittling away of every last church and mosque, but to imply that all Islam is on a par with al-Qa’eda is grotesque.’

I certainly don’t think ‘all Islam is evil’, though much of it is problematic for a liberal, Western, pluralist society. But I love the way that, even as he’s slurring me as anti-Islam, Johann Hari casually reveals that he’d like to see the end of ‘every last church and mosque’. Surely Islamophobia isn’t any more politically correct for being subsumed within theophobia, is it? The assumption of virtue by radical secularists comes so easily you wonder whether they ever stop to think it through.

For example, it is a fact that the most religious nation in the West is also the most powerful militarily, economically and culturally. Is that a coincidence? It could be. To suggest otherwise would be to claim the ‘special relationship with God’ that so distresses Max Hastings. So let’s look at it the other way: what happens when you opt for the ‘post-Christian future’?

Take my beloved Quebec. As recently as 1960, the birth rate in the province was an average of four children per couple. (Jean Chrétien, the recently retired Canadian prime minister, was the 18th of 19 children of a Quebec mill worker.) But then came the so-called ‘Quiet Revolution’, determined to free the people not just from the House of Windsor but from the Church of Rome, too. There’s a fine scene in Denys Arcand’s Barbarian Invasions in which a sad Catholic priest in Montreal explains to an art appraiser from London that one month in the Sixties the churches simply emptied out and the people never came back.

Fast forward to 1995, and Quebec’s referendum on ‘sovereignty’. Lucien Bouchard, the separatist leader of Her Majesty’s loyal opposition, wanders off-message in one speech and urges the women of the province to have more children because they have one of the lowest fertility rates of any ‘white race’ on the planet. Immediately, all the bien pensant types berate him for his faux pas. But the thing is, he wasn’t wrong. A couple of weeks later, his side narrowly lost the referendum, by a few thousand votes. Given that young Francophones tend to be separatist, had Quebec Catholics of the mid-Seventies had children at the same rate as their parents, M. Bouchard would now have his glorious république. Now he never will. Quebec couples have an average of 1.4 children, and their shrivelled fertility rate has cost them their country.

In the space of a generation, a Catholic backwater became the most militantly secularist jurisdiction in North America. Marriage is a dying institution: Quebec has the highest rate of common-law relationships on the continent. Families are a dying institution: Quebec has the highest rate of abortion in Canada. And more to the point, as far as the separatists are concerned, the dream of an independent country is dead. Andre Langevin, the enterprising mayor of Coaticook, a small town on my commute from New Hampshire to Montreal, offers his citizens $75 for their first child, $150 for the second, and $750 for every child thereafter, plus various other incentives. M. Langevin understands the basic arithmetic of the Euro-Canadian welfare state: without population growth, it’s insolvent. Unfortunately, the paradox of a welfarist society is that it weans people away from the familial impulse necessary to sustain it.

Maybe the collapse of the church and the looming demographic disaster facing Quebec and most of Catholic Europe is just another coincidence. But, for whatever reason, Europeans have less and less interest in God’s first injunction, to ‘go forth and multiply’. And, as a consequence, they’ll enjoy their post-Christian EUtopia, but only for the two or three generations it lasts. Russia is headed for the same fate. China, where Christianity is booming, seems unlikely to make the same mistake.

In his new book, Civilization and its Enemies, Lee Harris begins with the following observation: ‘Forgetfulness occurs when those who have been long inured to civilized order can no longer remember a time in which they had to wonder whether their crops would grow to maturity without being stolen or their children sold into slavery by a victorious foe. That, before 9/11, was what had happened to us. The very concept of the enemy had been banished from our moral and political vocabulary.’

Very true. But other countries at other times have been made ‘forgetful’ by civilised order. It’s the particular form of civilisation that makes this bout of forgetfulness potentially fatal. In post-Christian Europe — where fertile women who not so long ago would have had three children by the age of 24 now have one designer child at 39, where social welfare programmes depend on a growing population, where the main source of immigration is from a culture that despises secularism as weak, short-sighted narcissism — societal ‘forgetfulness’ isn’t just a passing phase you can snap out of. In this situation, the Christian fundamentalists, Holy Rollers, born-again Bible Belters and Jesus freaks of America are the rationalists. It’s the hyper-rationalists of secular Europe who are living on blind faith.

<< ok, i'll bite; what's "hesperophobic"? >>

The following is the best useage -- apart FRom my own, of course ;) -- of hesperophobic/hesperophobia I've come across in a long while.

In the context in which I employed the word, though, it means to convey the irrationally-froth-and-foam-flecked way in which Trudeau used to loathe despise and work against the interests of Our Beloved FRaternal Republic -- and in which many Canadians [The world's only people to have ever done away with both a national identity AND a country] -- still do.

Blessings -- Brian

QUOTE:

Hesperophobia

Back in 1982 there were some horrible massacres at two Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. Christian Lebanese Arabs actually did the killing -- but the Israeli army was in the neighborhood, and was responsible, at some theoretical level, for keeping the peace in the zone that included the camps. Because of this, the Israelis took much of the brunt of the world?s outrage at the killings. Commenting on these events, the Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, remarked in disgust: "Goyim kill goyim, and they blame the Jews!"

I?ve been getting the same feeling from some of my eMail. The fundamental reason America is under attack by Arab terrorists, several dozen people want me to know, is that the U.S. supports Israel. And the only reason we do that, several of them have said, or hinted, is because of the political power of the Jewish lobby here in the U.S.A. A few of my correspondents have expressed themselves more ... bluntly than that. Put it this way: while I have not yet encountered the word "bloodsuckers," [Perhaps my readership isn?t "diverse" enough] some of this stuff comes pretty close ? though I should say in fairness, most is argued on cold national-interest grounds. At any rate, a lot of people feel that the mass killing of Americans by Arab terrorists is all the fault of Israel and those American politicians who, for low and disreputable motives, or from sheer blindness to America?s true ideals and interests, support her. Goyim kill goyim, and they blame the Jews.

Setting aside the statistical certainty that some of the dead Americans are Jewish, [As, in high statistical probability, some were of Arab origins], and at the risk of yet more ill-tempered or abusive emails, I am going to declare that I don?t think these recent outrages can be blamed on the Jews, nor even on pro-Israel American politicians. The root phenomenon is not American involvement in Middle Eastern affairs: the root phenomenon is hesperophobia.

This word was coined by the political scientist Robert Conquest. Its roots are the Greek words ???????? [hesperos], which means "the west" and ????? [phobos], which means "fear," but which when used as an English suffix can also carry the meaning "hate".

Hesperophobia is fear or hatred of the West.

[While I?m in the classical stuff, by the way, I committed a breach of good manners in my last posting by inserting a Latin tag without translation. I am sorry. Oderint dum metuant means "Let them hate us, so long as they fear us." Seneca rebuked Cicero for saying it, though it seems to have been current among educated late-republican Romans]

Here is the news: a lot of people out there hate us. Does the name "Durban" mean anything? In China, in India, in Pakistan, in Indonesia and Malaysia, in Africa and in the Arab countries, European civilization -- "the West" -- is widely hated. And as a matter of fact, quite a lot of Europeans and Americans hate it, too, as you will know if you spend much time on college campuses.

I can?t see any strong reason for believing that if the state of Israel were to disappear from the face of the earth tomorrow, hesperophobia would disappear with it. Not even just Arab hesperophobia would decline. A common word for Europeans in the Arabic language is feringji, from "Frank", i.e. crusader. Arabs don?t hate us because we support Israel. They hate us because we humiliated them, showed up the gross inferiority of their culture. To them, and similarly humiliated peoples, we are the other, detested and feared in a way we can barely understand.

Things got really bad in the 19th century. When European society achieved industrial lift-off, Europeans were suddenly buzzing all over the world like a swarm of bees. They encountered these other cultures, which had been vegetating in a quiet conviction of their own superiority for centuries. [Or in the case of the Chinese, millennia] When these encounters occurred, the encountered culture collapsed in a cloud of dust. Some of them, like the Turks, managed to reconstitute themselves as more or less modern nations; others, like the Arabs and the Chinese, are still struggling with the trauma of that encounter.

Neither the Arabs nor the Chinese, for example, have yet been able to attain rational, constitutional government. For a devastating look at the paleolithic condition of politics and society in the Arab world, I strongly recommend my colleague David Pryce-Jones?s book, The Closed Circle.

The 1991 Gulf War showed how little has changed since those first encounters. Here were the armies of the West: swift, deadly, efficient, equipped and organized, under the command of elected civilians at the head of a robust and elaborate constitutional structure. And here were the Arabs: a shambling, ill-nourished, shoeless rabble, led by a mad gangster-despot. [That was their Arabs. There were also, of course, our Arabs -- the Kuwaitis and Saudis, cowering in their plush-lined air-conditioned bunkers being waited on by their Filipino servants while we did their fighting for them] Final body counts: the West, 134 dead, the Arabs, 20,000 or more.

The superiority of one culture over another has not been so starkly demonstrated since a handful of British wooden ships, at the end of ten-thousand-mile lines of communications, brought the Celestial Empire to its knees a hundred and fifty years earlier.

The Chinese are still mad about that and are still making angry, bitter, delusional movies about the Opium Wars.

A hundred and fifty years from now, the Arabs will not have forgotten the Gulf War.

If you haven?t spent some time in its company, the depth and bitterness of hesperophobia in these cultures is hard to imagine. As Thomas Friedman points out in today?s New York Times, Palestinian suicide bombers do not target yeshivas, synagogues or religious settlements. They go for shopping malls or Sbarro?s outlets. Sure, they hate the Jews, but they hate the West as much, or more.

Israel is not a cause of any of this, except to the degree that Israeli culture is essentially Western. If the present state of Israel were inhabited by Christian Lithuanians or Frenchmen, the hatred would be nearly as intense. Nearly, not completely: hatred of the Jews has been built into Arab-Moslem culture since the time of Mohammed.

There is a tale you will hear from Arab apologists that the Jews were contented and well-treated in the old Arab-Moslem empires. This is nonsense: more often than not, they were treated like swine. For a true account, read Joan Peters? From Time Immemorial, or Gil Carl Alroy Behind the Middle East Crisis. From the Arab point of view, Israel, or any Western state on "Arab land," is an outrage, an illegitimate creation, a crusader state. The fact that the Jews had a wealthy and powerful nation on that land three thousand years ago counts for nothing. Israel is, from the point of view of most Arabs, an alien graft that must not be allowed to "take." It is a reminder of what can barely be thought of without acute psychic pain: the squalid, hopeless, irredeemable inferiority of one?s own culture by comparison with another.

So, so, so, is this any of America?s business? What are we doing, meddling in the Middle East? Where is our interest? Well, U.S. politicians must speak for themselves, but if I had any position of authority in any Western nation, I would be urging full support for Israel, and I am not Jewish. [Following my Passover column, in fact, a lot of NRO readers, along with at least one ex-editor of The New Republic, believe I am an anti-Semite.] It?s a matter of cultural solidarity. We of the West must hang together, or else we shall hang separately. American isolationists simply do not understand how much we are hated in other places.

What, after all, does the Buchananite program offer us, if carried through? We have no troops in Israel to be withdrawn. If we withdraw our aid, the Israelis will be less able to defend themselves against the Arabs. Should we just let the free market take over, U.S. arms manufacturers selling weapons to them cash on the nail?

Apparently not: several of my correspondents have explained to me that the Arabs are enraged by the sight of their people being killed "by American weapons". Oh. No weapons, then [and presumably we should try to repatriate the ones they already have ? lots of luck with that, guys]. But if we don?t arm the Israelis, who will? While other hesperophobic countries ? China, for example ? are gleefully arming the Arabs and other Israel-haters like Iran, and pocketing the profits?

And the end of it all will be ... what? Inevitably, without our support, it will be the destruction of Israel. They are so few, and the Arabs so many. The Arabs will overwhelm that tiny state, and there will be such an orgy of massacre as has not been seen since the Rape of Nanking. And we shall be doing ... what? Watching it on our TVs, with a six-pack and a bucket of Nacho chips to hand? That?s the Buchananite vision? If so, it is a vision of cowards and fools, and I want no part of it.

Israel?s culture is ours. The Nation of Israel is part of the West and if that Nation goes down, we will have suffered a defeat, and the howling, jeering forces of barbarism will have won a victory. You don?t have to be Zionist, nor even Jewish, to support Israel. You don?t have to be in the pocket of the Israeli congressional lobbies, or a suck-up to "powerful pro-Zionist interests." You don?t have to pretend not to notice the occasional follies and cruelties of Israeli policy. You don?t have to forget about the U.S.S. Liberty or Jonathan Pollard. You just have to think straight. You just have to understand that the war between civilization and barbarism is being fought today just as it was fought at Chalons and Tours, at the gates of Kiev and Vienna, by the hoplites at Marathon and the legions on the Rhine. It is, as you have heard a thousand times, this past few days, a war; and the thing about war is, you have to take sides, and close your eyes to your allies? imperfections for the duration. There isn?t any choice. What happened this week was not, or not only, an act of anti-Americanism, anti-Israelism or anti-Semitism.

It was in part all those things:

But more than anything else, it was an act of hesperophobia.

END QUOTE.

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The US is powerful and religious; the EU is weak and secular. Mark Steyn wonders whether it is any coincidence