Posted on 02/04/2006 1:49:53 AM PST by mark_interrupted
Why radical Islam might defeat the West
"Does Spengler know, for instance, that in the last century 2,000 distinct ethnic groups have gone extinct?" Eric Garrett asks in his June 12 riposte, A question of identity, to an earlier article of mine, Neo-cons in a religious bind.
Garrett's organization, the World Conservation Union, is devoted to preserving fragile cultures. As a matter of fact, I reported in this space that in the next decade, yet another 2,000 distinct ethnic groups would go extinct (Live and Let Die of April 13, 2002). Ignore the endangered Ewoks for a moment, Mr Garrett, and explain why the imperial peoples of the past two centuries - Germans, Japanese, French, Italians, Russians, and so forth - have elected to disappear, through failure to reproduce (Why Europe chooses extinction, April 8).
Garrett and I focus on the same data, but with different agendas. His concern is the mass extinction of primitive cultures, which I think inevitable; my concern is the fall of Western civilization and the possible triumph of radical Islam. In neither case does the influence of Leo Strauss have any relevance. Europe and Japan, the erstwhile imperial oppressors of Garrett's 2,000 lost tribes, are dying out for the same reason that oppressed peoples died out, and thousands more soon will die out as well. With few exceptions, they were neither butchered nor dispossessed. Unlike the colonizers of the 16th century, who brought smallpox, the European colonists of the 20th century brought antibiotics. Western intervention secured the physical existence of aboriginal cultures, but undermined their will to live. Now it is the Europeans themselves who are endangered.
Socrates (like Strauss) was wrong. It is not the unexamined life that is not worth living, but the life defined by mere animal existence. Unlike lower species, humans require a sense of the eternal. The brute instinct for self-preservation is a myth. It should be no surprise. Precisely a century ago, George Bernard Shaw in his 1903 interlude Don Juan in Hell warned that Western hedonism would lead to depopulation.
The day is coming when great nations will find their numbers dwindling from census to census; when the six-roomed villa will rise in price above the family mansion; when the viciously reckless poor and the stupidly pious rich will delay the extinction of the race only by degrading it; whilst the boldly prudent, the thriftily selfish and ambitious, the imaginative and poetic, the lovers of money and solid comfort, the worshippers of success, of art, and of love, will all oppose to the Force of Life the device of sterility.
This brings us to the reason why Strauss has become something of a bore. The good professor (I mean this sincerely) hung his political-science hat on Hobbes, who threw out the traditional concept of God-given rights of man. He derived the social contract instead from man's brute instinct for self-preservation. In order to protect themselves against violence in the state of nature, men surrender part of their freedom to a ruler who in turn guarantees their security. By deriving natural rights from brute instinct rather than divine law, Strauss argued (Natural Right and History, 1950), Hobbes invented modern political science, that is, a discipline distinct from faith. Thus he made it possible to create a practicable republic composed of selfish men, unlike the utopian vision of Plato, which depended upon virtuous rulers. (Strauss sought to conjure out of Plato's writings a view similar to that of Hobbes, and I will let the classicists argue over whether his "esoteric" reading has merit.) Kant summarized the modern viewpoint: "We could devise a constitution for a race of devils, if only they were intelligent."
History exposes Hobbes's "self-preservation instinct" as a chimera. If men have no more than physical self-preservation, self-disgust will stifle them. Strauss knew that Hobbes's approach leads inevitably to nihilism, and he proposed a return to Athenian political philosophy as an antidote, although what that might accomplish is unclear. His students still quibble fruitlessly over whether Strauss "stayed with the moderns" or "went back to Athens".
Did someone in Washington take Kant literally and set about devising a constitution for devils with the Arab world in mind? Does it matter? Washington must talk about democracy in the Arab world, Strauss or no. Strauss, as in the Jewish joke about the man who sees a shop whose windows are full of clocks. He enters and tells the proprietor, "I want to buy a clock." The proprietor responds, "I don't sell clocks." "Then what do you do?" "I am a mohel [ritual circumciser]." "Then why do you put clocks in the window?" "What do you want me to put in the window?"
Which brings us to the threat of radical Islam. "You are decadent and hedonistic. We on the other hand are willing to die for what we believe, and we are a billion strong. You cannot kill all of us, so you will have to accede to what we demand." That, in a nutshell, constitutes the Islamist challenge to the West.
Neither the demographic shift toward Muslim immigrants nor meretricious self-interest explains Western Europe's appeasement of Islam, but rather the terrifying logic of the numbers. That is why President Bush has thrown his prestige behind the rickety prospect of an Israeli-Palestinian peace. And that is why Islamism has only lost a battle in Iraq, but well might win the war.
Not a single Western strategist has proposed an ideological response to the religious challenge of Islam. On the contrary: the Vatican, the guardian-of-last-resort of the Western heritage, has placed itself squarely in the camp of appeasement. Except for a few born-again Christians in the United States, no Western voice is raised in criticism of Islam itself. The trouble is that Islam believes in its divine mission, while the United States has only a fuzzy recollection of what it once believed, and therefore has neither the aptitude nor the inclination for ideological warfare.
Relativism is America's religion, as Leo Strauss complained. Only superficially can one explain this by the peculiar composition of the American people - that is, a collection of immigrants who willfully abandoned their cultures to begin again there, and view each other's customs with a peculiar blend of sentimentality and indifference. Americans fail to grasp decisive strategic issues not only because they misunderstand other cultures, but because they avert their gaze from the painful episodes of their own history. In his book The Metaphysical Club, Prof Louis Menand observes that the horrors of the Civil War discredited the idealism of young New Englanders (his case study is Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr), producing the vapid pragmatism that has reigned since then in American culture. Americans suffer from a form of traumatic amnesia, such that every generation of Americans must learn the hard way.
Garrett thinks that Strauss's critique of relativism provides a moral prop for American unilateralism. He can relax. Strauss's case is weak. It amounts to reductio ad absurdum: "All societies have their ideals, cannibal societies no less than civilized ones. If principles are sufficiently justified by the fact that they are accepted by a society, the principles of cannibalism are as defensible or sound as those of civilized life." Now comes Garrett, whose job it is to defend cannibal societies' right to exist. Strauss in his worst nightmares could not have imagined Garrett.
Strauss cannot convince Garrett. Indeed, he could not convince himself. Strauss knew perfectly well that philosophy could not refute relativism ("radical historicism"), hence his helplessness before Heidegger's parlour tricks. Strauss gave up on Nietzsche largely because Heidegger offered a sharper critique of rationalism. (Garrett's interpretation of Nietzsche as a philosemite seems idiosyncratic, to say the least, considering that Nietzsche denounced his erstwhile idol Wagner as a Jew after Wagner made peace with Christianity in Parsifal.)
Critics of the neo-conservatives accuse them of following Machiavelli, via Strauss. The charge sticks to Michael Ledeen, but surely not to Irving Kristol, the "godfather" of neo-conservatism, who spurned Machiavelli as a "the first nihilist". Who cares? Machiavelli was a Florentine lightweight who hoped that the poisoner Cesare Borgia would unite Italy. What Italian has done anything of political importance in the past 500 years? What effect on history had all the stiletto-and-arsenic games of the Italian condottiere?
Grim men of faith - Loyola, Oldebarnevelt, Richilieu, Mazarin - led the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, while the Florentines amused the tourists (The sacred heart of darkness, February 11). The trouble with Strauss, I reiterate, is that he was an atheist, rather a disadvantage in a religious war. The West has no armed prophet. It doesn't even have an armed theologian.
Europe's problem isn't hedonism; Europe's problem is socialism.
Wasn't it Arnold Toynbee that civilizations are never defeated
by external threats, but that they commit suicide?
One leads to the other.
How many people voted for John Kerry in the last election?
Yes, but the direction is definitely:
socialism -> hedonism
and not
hedonism -> socialism
And you can do nothing about the hedonism so long as you have the socialism, because the socialism leads directly to the hedonism.
PS. And actually, in Western society the direction is as follows:
socialism -> women's liberation -> hedonism
But it's very un-PC of me to put it how it is!
Anyhow, that's why you can do nothing much about either the socialism or the hedonism, because women's liberation depends on the former and produces the latter.
That's why time is better spent figuring out how to get modern Western society to succeed despite both socialism and hedonism, because they're here to stay. Reminiscing about a fading past that's dead and gone gets you nowhere.
Maybe we're doomed, but I think technology is what'll save us in the end and keep us in the lead for a long time to come.
I don't know about that. Though the conflict has a material dimension it also has a spiritual dimension as well. That is the Achilles Heel of the West.
The original article was written in 2003.
except we sell or give away our technology by manufacturing overseas.
quite frankly, the nazis beat the nazis first. a fatal flaw in their philisophical foundation led to their defeat. of course, we helped, as did the russians and everyone else. i dont see such an allied group going after islam in time, do you?
Great line in a great article. It may be old but it's certainly valid and full of great points - thanks for posting it!
One thing has changed, however, since 2003: the Vatican, which he describes as the defender of last resort of Western culture but one which had, alas, also opted for appeasement of Muslims, now has a different head. It is obvious that one of the biggest priorities of the new Pope is that of restoring Western culture and the society based on its now nearly-vanished principles. He has also been very firm and realistic when speaking about Islam. I think this is one very positive change, hopeful for the West, that has occurred since this article was written.
The spiritual dimension is simply an unwillingness to proclaim and advance the superiority of our culture - Western culture. This results simply from the rejection of Christian tradition, which is in actuality a rejection of patriarchy more than anything. This brings things back to women's liberation, which is still a novelty in many ways, so that the ramifications haven't yet entirely worked themselves out.
The question at hand is whether secular Western values can exercise the same function, and that's what the Europeans are working out right now with this Muhammad cartoon controversy. The problem is that secular values don't tend to involve fanatic zealotry as do religious values. Secular values are inherently predicated on rationalism, and reason is never fanatic.
Then also, the notion that secular values are what define and unify the West is not embraced by all of Western society - not by a long shot. There are many who think that the solution is to be found in winding back the clock. That's exactly what this article is getting at. So long as the West is torn between the two, I doubt that it will prevail over the long run.
PS. And the best option, in my view, is to reinterpret Christianity in such a way as to eliminate patriarchy, which is a process that's been ongoing, but far from complete and far from certain. You can't just wave your hand and say 'this is how it should be' when it comes to religion. At least not anymore. The last person to do that with any success was Joseph Smith, and before that Mohammad. I doubt it's gonna happen again anytime soon, if ever.
Opps! I left out Martin Luther. He qualifies too!
just because i dont think like you, i must be a trouble maker? then you question my location? are you a joke?
ok, im american by birth and live in the usa. btw, i am a contrarian by your definition. i would also say that the policies of the majority vis a vis toward islam is what got us into this problem. perhaps more should think a bit contrarian
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