The Suicide of Reason
Below is from David Warren's review of Lee Harris's new book, The Suicide of Reason. Harris is very, very good, and he's exactly right about this. Those who counsel understanding and negotiation as responses to radical Islam show themselves to be completely clueless about the nature of this enemy. Terms like "fanatic" or "terrorist" indicate nothing about what motivates these people. Fundamentalist Islam is a more formidable opponent than Nazism or Communism ever was, or ever could have been. Resurgent Islam is not going to fall of its own weight; it will have to be defeated.
Byron
Byron
Americans, and other English-speaking peoples, had enough trouble trying to grasp what made Nazis and Communists tick. They were fanatics, to be sure, yet even they could speak, to some degree, the "common European language" of reason and self-interest, and to that degree could be bargained with.
With "Islamism," we encounter an ideology that goes not against but with the grain of [its] society [Harris argues that Nazism and Communism went against the traditional Christian grain of their societies, and for that reason were easier to throw off], 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, are peculiarly ill-equipped to defend ourselves against it.
[ ... ]
We are not dealing with an anomaly, as our use of that word "fanatic" would suggest, but of an alien social order that is perfectly viable, and entirely non-Western in its premises.
We in the West, and especially we in such places as North America and Australia, have lived so long and so comfortably with the contrary premises that we cannot look at the enemy without translating his behaviour into what is familiar to us. We imagine him to be playing by our rules, even when he is obviously not. We dream about "negotiating." We suffer hallucinations in which we describe the means and ends of the Jihadists in our own political vocabulary of give-and-take.
We have been made myopic by the very success and endurance of our own social order, forgetting that it is itself a fluke of history.
There is no inevitable progress in this world toward democracy and the rule of law. And there is no law of nature that ensures the triumph of reason over zealotry.
posted by Byron | Saturday, July 14, 2007
2 Comments:
Could be somewhere on the right map, but from the column, it looks to me as though he's dead wrong. It seems as though folks who've taken one anthropology course think that they deeply understand the nature of culture and cultural differences. Generally, the notion is that being African means to buy a dashiki and give your wife a clitorectomy and you're there. To be Islamic (at the core) is to flop on your face five times a day, go to Mecca and grow a beard. With such facile notions, multiculturalism is a walk in the park. Just say you honor folks who routinely eat grubs -- now you got it. Hey guys, now we can buy suntans in a jar.
So are as I know, only Colin Turnbull has found a culture that was self-destructive and deserved to be so. The rest, however disfunctional in appearances seemed to make it just fine until we bought their land to grow bananas or some other such thing. Rather than pay much attention to smug, urban intellectuals who mostly pontificate with an air of well-fed detachment, let's pack the lot of them up, put them individually in villages beyond the reach of the modern world and leave them there for minimum of a couple years. Then, let them come back and explain what is meant by culture and cultural differences. Anything short of having the fundamental experience of becoming fluent in a totally different culture by total and lengthy immersion leaves these guys with little more than lovely and intuitively appealling speculations -- lacking bona fides in understanding cultural differences.
My view, having done the above, is to suggest that the west has gotten a leg up through conscious exploitation and rapacity -- the means used by every other society as well. Now, we find ourselves a generation without the balls to keep what we've got. Let's pass up the understanding and get out the daisy cutters.
love and kisses
fred
Fred:
I'm trying to figure out where you see any disagreement between Harris and yourself. His point was precisely to emphasize the dangerous consequences of a failure of cross-cultural understanding on our part, meaning our lack of an accurate comprehension of the nature of this enemy. He is not talking about understanding in the degenerate, round-heeled sense of a self-abnegating faux-empathic acceptance of the enemy's aims and point of view. Tout compris, tout a excusé? Far from it. The question is whether we are equipped to understand that we are confronting an irreducible, non-negotiable cultural divide.
Turnbull's Ik may have been non-viable, but Harris is clear that he thinks Islamic society is perfectly viable, or as I said, it is not going to fall of its own weight. He argues that the idea that some logic of history preordains that civilization necessarily ascends toward liberal democracy is nothing but fantasy, value-laden cultural myopia of the worst kind. I've argued all along that it could turn out, in an ironic twist on Marx, that some sort of theocracy that takes advantage of modern Western technologies (which 12th-century Al Qaeda is proving amazingly adept at doing, btw, from jet aircraft to cell phones and the internet) could prove to be the most stable form of human society. Opium of the masses, and with a vengeance. It may be our beloved secular, liberal democracy that turns out to have the fatal internal contradictions; we're going to find out over the next century or so. Your point about no longer having the balls is spot on, as that may be the inevitable tendency. It is not hard to describe a scenario where secular liberal democracy results in high productivity, high standards of living, spiritual vacancy, and pervasive demoralization; look at Europe. The Iron Law of Decadence: Heavy boots going upstairs, satin slippers coming down. Will the resulting system be more superstitious, less affluent, less equal, and less free? No doubt, but so what?
Harris's thesis seems to be -- I've only read the review, not the book -- that as children of the French Enlightenment, we imagine that fundamentalist, jihadist Islam can be reasoned with, that reason is some kind of universal, transcultural solvent, capable of eliminating any and all conflicts -- "Come, let us reason together" as sacramental words with magical powers. Harris rejects that notion unequivocally, and he sees holding onto that view as the Suicide of Reason. Anyway, if we claim everything is negotiable, then we're either liars or cowards. Are we in the West prepared to negotiate away the rights of women, or our conceptions of objective science? Are we willing to fight and kill as necessary for such things? Those are two forms of the same question.
The Enlightenment was a very brief and very atypical episode in history. It was quickly superseded by German Romanticism, which rejected reason in favor of emotion. We in the U.S. have a distorted view of that, because our government and founding documents were established and written during that brief Enlightenment window. We are like pieces of amber, preserving a historical anomaly in our view of the world. But only a few years later, the French Revolution demonstrated just how brief and anomalous the Enlightenment was, as it devolved into the Terror, a bloodbath that culminated in the Napoleonic tyranny and years of lavish slaughter from one end of Europe to the other.
Harris's point, it seems to me, is that an accurate understanding of radical Islam will result in our having to admit that we very well may have to get out those daisy cutters, and use them. But lots may happen before then. We may choose to put defeatists in charge, for example, and to try their ideas of negotiation and strategic disengagement. Many a slip between the cup and the lip. We can drift in dreams if we want, twist this way and that in our hopeful imagination, but eventually this enemy is going to call the tune.
Byron
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