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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
September 1, 2002
Testing worldviews
With the first anniversary of 9/11 approaching (good morning it is September again) I want to extend last week's reflections on "Bush and Lincoln". A year after the most dramatic event my generation has witnessed we remain in the early stages of what I think must eventually prove a great if unprecedented and unavoidable war. The enemy that transnational "Islamist fanaticism" is far from defeated. We have only begun our journey down that road. From reading my readers in e-mail and so forth I see that I have generated several fresh misunderstandings. For example I was not saying that Bush is like Lincoln or that he is modelling himself on Lincoln or that he has a "strategic plan" that resembles Lincoln's in detail -- although there are many nice superficial comparisons to be made under each of these heads. In fact Mr. Bush's present reading would suggest he is more curious about Winston Churchill -- that magnificent magnificent war leader. I was saying instead that I believe Mr. Bush has adopted a strategy that is "Lincolnesque". The extremely attentive reader will have noticed that I think he arrived at this not from immersing himself in Lincoln's life and times but through a rather humble contemplation of the information before him as President mixed with quietly earnest prayer. He has looked at the whole threat to world order and he has seen that it requires a whole response something large that must unfold in time and stages -- a response which goes to the root of that threat in the unfreedom of especially the Islamic world. Let me set Mr. Bush aside for a moment and simply speak for myself since merely mentioning the President's name puts some readers off their porridge. There are two contradictory views now being presented in the marketplace of ideas. Most people have bought into one or the other less from reading than because they are in the air. One is that of Samuel Huntington author of The Clash of Civilizations (1996) a view founded in the great historians from Thucydides forward. This wisely holds that the differences between the peoples of the world's major "civilizations" -- the largest linguistic cultural and religious heritages -- go very deep into historical time. They cannot be casually eradicated or bridged in any moment; they evolve at their own speed while remaining true to their own spirit their own inner cores of values. These civilizations must clash of necessity and our duty as peoples of the West if we want to preserve what we are must be more like watching our gates than like trying to make the other cultures Western. The latter is a fool's game. The other view is that of Francis Fukuyama author of The End of History (1992) founded in the post-Enlightenment and essentially revolutionary thought of Hegel and his 20th-century disciple Alexandre Kojeve. This holds that the clash of civilizations is itself ultimately superficial that among the many civilizational models only one can ultimately prevail because it "works" better than any of the others. No matter what civilizational route you take you must wind up with something like American-style capitalism plus whatever proves to be the right proportion of regulatory bureaucracy; for this is what best accommodates the broadest range of human behaviour. Sooner or later this basic stew or mild curry must prevail everywhere and like it or lump it it will bring to an end the "clash of civilizations" and in that sense the end of history as previously understood. Huntington is deep Fukuyama is shallow. Both may be arguably half right but the truth is not in the middle. Huntington discounts the extraordinary speed with which humans can adapt individually and collectively to new circumstances; Fukuyama discounts the degree to which they must reach within their own cultural traditions to do so. Fukuyama also fails to see that cultural traits are constantly emerging as well as receding that human beings are much too creative to settle into permanent homogeneity. There's the devil in us; and there is God too. The best attempt I have seen to "bridge" at least between Huntington and Fukuyama is by an obscure American thinker named Lee Harris. No surprise that I like him: Mr. Harris has followed his own eccentric course to something like my own ideas on what is going on today. His key text Al Qaeda's Fantasy Ideology was published in a U.S. highbrow magazine called Policy Review for August. Two supplementary essays Sheep Amidst Wolves and "Neo-Sovereignty" are not yet published but can be dug out of "RealPolitik" the Internet blog of one Brian Chapin. They are worth the digging. What Mr. Harris grasps then thinks through is the psychopathology not only of Osama bin Laden but of his very numerous admirers. It is a form of the mass hysteria to which humans are unfortunately prone comparable in many respects to Hitlerism and other millenarian movements. The followers of Al Qaeda -- the exponents of political "Islamism" as opposed to the religion "Islam" -- are not so much attacking the United States as living out a collective psychotic fantasy. (Curiously it was President Bush's instinctive use of such expressions as "evil-doer" that showed he recognized the phenomenon.) The people who fall into this fantasy come out of a culture to be sure and their fantasy is flavoured by that culture. But it is an event in itself it is not inevitable to that culture. It may arise from a failure of that culture but -- most important thing -- the behaviour is more human than Islamic. The terrorists themselves once infected by the "virus" of this fantasy ideology can be either "de-programmed" or killed; you cannot negotiate with people who are truly out of their minds. But the culture out of which they came is lithe and flexible. Like every large civilization it has the means to recovery within itself; and may be brought back into normal communication with the world beyond its frontiers. But first it must be liberated. What is "Lincolnesque" in President Bush's strategy as I believe it will unfold is a determination through all the means at his disposal to free that world from its enslavement to dark masters so that it can find its own way home; starting with the elimination of Saddam Hussein and the support of home-grown democratic institutions in Iraq. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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