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Saturday, February 16, 2008
The Heretic: The Clash Of Non-Civilizations
Yes, it's the beginning of yet another essay series.
Your Curmudgeon yields to no one in his admiration for the great Mark Steyn, the clearest and most fearless voice in the Anglosphere. It's a mark of Steyn's significance, and of his critical importance to the defense of freedom, that he's become a target of "hate speech" hall monitors in Canada and Islamic groups worldwide. Nothing we of the Internet Commentariat can do could be more important than protecting Steyn from his enemies, and defending him with our own emissions whenever it becomes necessary.
Regard well these interview clips, produced by Michelle Malkin:
- Mark Steyn: Islam and the West, Part I
- Mark Steyn: Islam and the West, Part II
- Mark Steyn: Islam and the West, Part III
- Mark Steyn: Islam and the West, Part IV
Have you, Gentle Reader, ever heard the case for the War against Islam -- never mind that old "War on Terror" canard; terror is a tactic, not a movement nor a nation nor an ideology -- made better than that? Have you ever heard the foundation of Europe's troubles with Islam delineated more clearly than that?
But even Homer nods. At one point in the interview, Steyn observes that "you can't have a clash of civilizations unless the civilizations rub up against one another." This is true enough, yet as Steyn applies it to the context of the War against Islam, it embeds a significant departure from absolute precision and clarity...and of course, that's precisely the sort of flaw for which your Curmudgeon stands vigilant, ever ready to apply the remedy.
If your Curmudgeon's memory serves, Samuel Huntington originated the conception of the "clash of civilizations" in our modern context. The phrase has achieved wide currency. Quite a few folks think they know what they mean by it. As a capsule for the worldwide conflict between liberal societies and Islam, it has both virtues and defects.
Yes, there's a "clash" between the liberal societies and the mental malady that calls itself Islam. The conflict could hardly be more dramatic. Liberal societies adhere, albeit broadly and imperfectly, to a Rule of Law, under which the identities of persons, their personal convictions, their economic and social stature, and their political connections are held irrelevant to any and all contests between them. Islam utterly denies the Rule of Law; rather, the followers of Muhammad's lunacy believe themselves privileged to reign over all the world and everyone in it. The men among them are further privileged to brutalize and tyrannize women -- all women, everywhere. The imams, mullahs, and ayatollahs have even greater privileges. A joke from the days after the Iranian Revolution of 1979 has much point:
The portents were grim. The scryers had announced that, beyond the slightest possibility of doubt, the Islamic Revolution that had taken the rule of Iran would fail at once unless its progenitor, the hallowed Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, immediately had sex with a woman. Though his governing council was as appalled as he, they insisted that the great one bend to Allah's Will as the foretellers had discerned it."As foul a thing as this is," Khomeini snarled, "if Allah has decreed it, so it must be. But I will impose three conditions even so."
"State them, O Blessed Leader," one of his councilors said.
"First," he said, "the woman you bring to my bed must be made blind, so that she cannot look upon my pure being."
"And so it shall be, O Guiding Light. What else?"
"Second, she must be made mute, so that she can speak no blasphemy to me."
"And so it shall be, O Blessed One. What else?"
"And third," Khomeini rumbled, "she must have really big tits."
There's little need to add to that. The clash is real. More, it's irresolvable by compromise, "dialogue," or any of the other shibboleths of the cultural relativists on the Left. There can be no compromise between freedom and slavery. That the slavers claim the Word of God as their justification alters matters not one whit.
What is a civilization? The term is used casually, as a label for everything from nations to chess clubs. Yet it has a precise meaning...one which, at this point in human history, describes nothing extant on the face of the Earth.
We have difficulty in dealing with the concept of a civilization because we've spent so little time and effort on inspecting its differentia: the qualities that distinguish a civilization from other human groupings. Dictionary definitions don't help; they're uniformly polluted with the miasma of misuses the term has already suffered. For clarity, let's review the differentiae of other large groupings commonly bruited about:
- A nation is a political entity with a functioning government and enough coherence around its legal structure and social institutions to produce mass resistance to invasion or subversion, though perhaps not always successfully.
- A country is a geographically delimited region whose denizens are more or less at peace with one another. It might or might not have a recognized government whose legitimacy is generally acknowledged.
- A culture is a set of shared aesthetic and behavioral norms, frequently expressed in the arts and in the codes of conduct, public and private, espoused by its leading lights.
- A society is a group of persons with one or more shared interests, who subscribe to a shared ethic of intra-societal dealing, whether they articulate it or not.
- A religion is a body of beliefs about the supernatural realm (including whether or not it exists), from which flow a mythos about the relations, historical and immediate, of the supernatural to the natural, and an ethos of right and wrong consistent with that mythos.
None of these things is congruent with the proper definition of a civilization:
- A nation is not a civilization. There have been many nations properly regarded as uncivilized, including some that have cast large shadows upon human history.
- A country is not a civilization. Peace within a geographical region implies nothing else about the people within it, nor about any ideals they might hold.
- A culture is not a civilization. At best, it's a proper subset of a civilization. Also, a civilization can host several distinct cultures, as long as they agree to a shared norm of interaction.
- A society is not a civilization, though a civilization must pertain to one or more societies. A society's code is always ad hoc, to serve the specific aims of the society, insofar as it has any. Such a code is seldom as extensive as is required to produce a civilization.
- A religion is not a civilization, though of the five groupings mentioned here, it comes closest. A religion can say little to nothing about the relations between its members and its non-members; a civilization must do more.
A civilization, to be something different from the above, must be a collection of one or more societies:
- Whose overarching identity is independent of the identities of individual participants;
- Each of which enforces a shared set of civil norms that apply to all individuals, expressed in their legal systems and enforced by their governmental structures;
- Each of which also upholds a shared set of cultural constraints, expressed by social discrimination and enforced by ostracism or boycott;
- All of which will defend those norms and constraints when they're attacked;
- Which promulgates standards for individuals' conduct toward one another in private, whether those standards are derived from religious, traditional, or rational sources;
- Which divides members from non-members according to their fidelity toward those norms, cultural constraints, and standards.
The societies of the Christian Enlightenment constituted a civilization. Classical Judea was a civilization in its own right, as were the Roman Republic and the Hellenic city-states. But Islam is not a civilization. Neither is any contemporary nation in the group we metaphorically call the West.
Think about it.
The Balkanized fragments of the lapsed Christian-Enlightenment civilization are at war with the barbarous cult called Islam. As Baron Bodissey and Dymphna of The Gates of Vienna will tell you, the current unpleasantnesses are just the latest phase in a war soon to enter its fifteenth century. History records no other conflict of this length...or of this importance. Unfortunately, one side has forgotten what it's supposed to be fighting for, while the other has never attained any of the qualities required to advance from barbarism to civilization.
There's much talk of "high Islamic civilizations" of the medieval centuries, notably the Saracen period in Spain. It's all froth and gas. History records the same brutalities and tyrannies from those places and times as we can observe today in the Muslim Middle East. Islam was as harsh and as barbaric then as now. Women, dissidents, and non-Muslims in Muslim-dominated societies were subjected to cruelties and constraints unimaginable to a free American of our time: cruelties and constraints designed to bring about the elimination of non-Muslim communities. They always have been and always will be. Islam itself commands it; Islam blesses those who implement its most brutal strictures; Islam hallows those who die while carrying the fight to the "unbeliever."
As for Christian-Enlightenment civilization, of which the United States is the sole recognizable remnant, it ceased to exist around 1919, when the great mass of its participating societies abjured the Christian cultural and personal ethos that united them into a civilized body. Just about that time, the emergence of anti-American groups within the United States put a permanent crack into our own social cohesion. There were groups that preached hatred of immigrants, and groups that encouraged the phenomenon of the "hyphenated-American." There were groups that advocated the expulsion of Negroes, and groups that strove to forge American Negroes into a revolutionary force. There were groups that worked for the overthrow of the Constitution and the Sovietization of the country, and groups that advised Americans to attach themselves to political structures other than America. Viewing them separately from one another, one could be fooled into thinking that they amounted to little. Yet they gave aggregate birth to a rough beast that has scattered us over a dark and forbidding plain, unmarked by shared religious, philosophical, or cultural pathways. They made us a nation of special interests, each in competition with the others for the best spot at the manger.
The nations of Europe are in even worse shape, as any observer of the Old World's devolution will tell you.
What we have is not a clash of civilizations. Islam fails all the requirements for a civilization, while the West has let the common legal and ethical core required of a civilization slip from its grasp. Only America still retains a fingernail grip on the core ideals of the Christian Enlightenment: the breakthrough in human thought that flensed the authoritarian excrescences from the Christian ethos, rendering it compatible with human reason and human freedom, and thus creating the philosophical and cultural foundations for the greatest civilization in human history. The rest of the West has anathematized those ideals and demolished those foundations.
What we have is a clash between the remnants of a civilization and a horde of barbarians. It recalls the last decades of the Roman Empire. Recent events suggest that Rome's fate might await the West.
The barbarians of today are religiously motivated. That makes them more, not less formidable than the Visigoths, the Vandals, and the Huns. They have access to the technologies of their enemies, by dint of our fatuous acceptance of dependence on the oil resources we have permitted them to wrest from us. Thanks to our media, they know that fifth columnists -- multiculturalists; moral relativists; anti-Americans and would-be tyrants of every sort -- work continuously and determinedly to weaken what remains of our grip on the ideals, norms, and constraints that make us what we are.
They believe they're winning. They could be right.
We may no longer be part of an overarching civilization, but the preponderance of us are civilized men. Like civilized men of all times, we'd like to see our adversary as equally civilized -- as someone who shares our fundamental principles of right action, and thus can be reasoned with. This is not the case. Barbarians are barbarians because they reject reason and all assertions of principle. Nor can they be bargained with. It's never been possible to appease a barbarian enemy of any sort, as the Europeans have forgotten and Israelis have learned to their sorrow. Barbarians can only be confined or exterminated. The former is preferable, but the window of opportunity is rapidly closing...indeed, it may already have closed.
Quarantine or genocide. Take your choice, there is no other -- and your time is running out.
Comments
Fran, you say quarantine or genocide. I think it is going to have to be a bit of both. Enough genocide to get the proportions back to a reasonable scale (this is really just killing in warfare), and then we can talk about quarantine. The problem with quarantine is that it is not permanent; it requires constant maintenance. There is always the risk of some idiot do-gooder deciding that they have a new way of dealing with these folks, and enlightened way, and, uh-oh, we are right back where we started. (Maybe an idiot do-gooder genocide is what we need?)
Posted by on 02/16/2008 at 11:29 PMI’ve quoted you extensively and linked to you here: http://consul-at-arms.blogspot.com/2008/02/re-heretic-clash-of-non-civilizations.html
Posted by Consul-At-Arms on 02/18/2008 at 01:38 AMThat quarantine idea hasn’t worked out too well for Israel, now has it? And yeah, after a while of succeeding at it, some do-gooder decides that they’re all reformed, and lets the guard down. Then you get the mess of Israel’s surrender of the West Bank and the destruction of all that was productive there, in addition to missile launches from there into Israel.
Hate to say it, but there’s no more Nazis, or Imperialists of Japan anymore because we killed enough of the stalwarts that the rest said to heck with that. We just weren’t in the quarantining mood back in the day, I’d guess.
Posted by mts on 02/18/2008 at 02:11 AMDr. D, MTS, you could be right. I don’t claim to have infallible insight into what’s required or what will come. But I think we have a moral obligation to try to quarantine Islam to its existing demesne before we pull the nukes.
It is possible, as you both suggest, that no reliable quarantine could be instituted—that nothing short of a real, declared, take-no-prisoners war will quell Islam’s threat to the U.S. and the rest of the West. But I refuse to leap to that solution in a single bound. I want to try confinement first.
One of the possible consequences of strictly imprisoning Islam in the Muslim Middle East—no one permitted out and no trade between Muslim and non-Muslim nations—is the collapse of those states and the economy of the region. If they can’t sell their oil, they have little else. The region is technologically and capitally feeble. Were such a collapse to occur, the possibility of imposing reform on the survivors could be considered.
We owe them nothing...but we owe our consciences an honest effort to eliminate the threat they pose without mass bloodshed. It would mean extensive changes in our military structure and our foreign policies. It would require that we wean ourselves from Middle Eastern oil. It would require that we reduce—hopefully temporarily—our standard of living. But it could save many millions of lives.
Israel’s security fence has produced a dramatic reduction in Muslim terror strikes against Israel. Most conservatives want to fence our southern border, as a palliative to the illegal-immigration problem. Neither approach is perfect, but both have exhibited considerable virtues. Similarly, quarantining Islam isn’t guaranteed to work, but it might—and we won’t know unless we try it.
Posted by Francis W. Porretto on 02/18/2008 at 09:19 AM
