Time to Rethink the Defense of Reason

Lee Harris is among the few living writers who do not, as the saying goes, "subtract from the sum total of human knowledge" with each new essay. I've puffed him before, and will puff him again, the more shamelessly in the knowledge that his new book, The Suicide of Reason, is probably not even available in Canada.

As usual, Mr Harris is skiing uphill against the assumptions his American countrymen and others through the West have brought into the inaptly-named "war on terror." We seem incapable of projecting ourselves, even cursorily, into the mind of our mortal enemy, and the language we use to describe him, even when it is not cowardly and politically correct ("supporters" of Al Qaeda, "militants," etc.), conceals more than it reveals. Even in clearer, less compromised writing, the enemy is presented as un-adjectived "fanatics," or "terrorists" -- which they are, but the terms do not get us any closer to their motivations.

"Islamists" -- an abbreviation I use, and explain from time to time, and which has at least the virtue that it is acceptable to both the enemy himself, and most of that enemy's Muslim critics -- is also ultimately misleading. With considerable decorum and restraint, Mr Harris goes to the trouble of reminding that it is impossible to present the tenets of the Taliban, Al Qaeda, Hamas, or the Muslim Brotherhood on the Sunni side; or of Hezbollah, Iraq's blackshirts, or Iran's revolutionary ayatollahs on the Shia side; as complete aberrations of Islam. They do quote Koran and Hadiths accurately enough, and they evoke a semi-legendary history of armed Jihad and conquest that resonates among unwesternized Muslim listeners.

This is what makes the ideology of "Islamism" different in kind from Nazism and Communism, and will, over the coming decades or centuries, make it...

A fascinating article, and thanks for posting it. I have only minor differences with Mr. Harris which may or may not be particularly significant.

Islamism is not Islam, but it aspires to be and is, due largely to oil money, well on its way to becoming so. Abd-al-Wahhab allied himself with the House of Saud in the 18th century, not the 8th, and many of his more sadistic practices - stoning of adulteresses, for one - were very much out of keeping with the practice of the time. The Sufi scholars of his time thought him a monster. His successor Qutb was hung. This is not "mainstream" Islam but it intends to be.

Its methods depend nearly entirely on modern technology and oil money for funding. A lone fanatic with a sword may kill dozens before he is cut down. One behind the controls of an airliner may kill 3000. One with modern explosives may have illimitable victims unless he is caught. In the absence of computers, cell phones, modern transportation and communications, they are nothing. Without the West they are nothing. Should they become victorious over the West they will again become nothing.

That's sort of cold comfort because we'll all be dead by then - I haven't personally the slightest inclination toward submission and would be happy to help the thugs attain the martyrdom they claim to desire. Like world socialism, Islamism cannot afford to win - it would kill its very source of life, and that is not the Qur'an but Western economies and their ability to generate the wealth that must be expropriated in pursuit of a world that will not allow it. Like world socialism it is a suicidal culture; unlike world socialism it admits it openly.

There is no inevitable progress in this world towards democracy and the rule of law. And there is no law of nature that ensures the triumph of reason over zealotry. Reason itself demands that we rethink the defence of reason.

With that I agree wholeheartedly. The natural human state in the absence of a transcendent culture appears to be a tribalism that fits Islamism like a glove. We see the devolution of culture toward tribalism within our own Western societies - those who deny that transcendent culture - the nihilists, the postmodernists, the socialist opium-smokers - will eventually fail to enjoy its benefits. It may well be that history repeats itself here and the West will be once again defended by that minority of its population that understand it. If it fails there will be no Islamist utopia in this world - the Caliphate will preside over poverty, oppression, and death, and promise a paradise in the next world only for the faithful that it cannot ever and does not intend to deliver on this earth.

With "Islamism," we encounter an ideology that goes not against, but with the grain of the society on which it preys, and makes its appeal to that society's ancient aspirations. Mr Harris is hardly alone in noticing that, but nearly alone in explaining coherently why we Western children of the Enlightenment, and especially his fellow American liberal individualists and exceptionalists, are peculiarly ill-equipped to defend against it.

I keep thinking about the old saying in politics that you can't beat something with nothing.

That is true in other spheres of life as well.

The challenge of Islamism is not primarily military or even political but moral and religious. The Islamists are acting according to a vision of the future which resonates with a large number of people throughout the world. It promises not just a return to the earthly glory of the Caliphate, but ultimately eternal glory with God.

The only way to beat such a vision is with a stronger, more compelling one. Material prosperity is not enough. (Most of the 9-11 conspirators were well-off, not poor.) A limp-wristed agnosticism will not do.

We in the West must provide people an alternative religious vision, one that will offers a better world here and hereafter. Undoubtedly, this will require a revival of our moribund faith in the God of the Old and New Testaments.

When Ann Coulter wrote that to defeat the Islamists, "we should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity," she may have been right in part. Few of use desire to invade or kill anyone. But a conversion to Christianity may be exactly what is called for.

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