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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
January 13, 2002
What we demand
Since Sept. 11th 2001 the air has been cleaner. Say what you will against terrorist strikes and I have said much we have also derived a benefit from them. A large amount of fatuity that had gone unchallenged in public life is now being challenged. The people themselves have been waking up. This has been especially true in the United States where the terrorists hit; but a sympathetic reaction has spread from the epicentre in Manhattan all round the world. Even Canada is already a much different country than it was on Sept. 10th and the tide is still moving quickly. Some of us who thought "Western civilization" was on its last legs who were close to despairing about the future have been awakened to fresh hope. We had no idea there could be such spunk in the old bird; that she wouldn't consent to have her neck twisted. In his famous book Irrational Man the American philosopher William Barrett explained this phenomenon decades ago: "The most basic things are always learned with pain since our inertia and complacent love of comfort prevent us from learning them until they are forced upon us. It appears that man is willing to learn about himself only after some disaster; after war economic crisis and political upheaval have taught him how flimsy is that human world in which he thought himself so securely grounded." I have been trying to take advantage of this new atmosphere this new clarity in these Sunday Spectators. I am just one little voice but I've been trying to raise it to discuss the big important things that had fallen into neglect. And I'm delighted in my mail to find people are listening and thinking for themselves. The energy is there to reconstruct our world to dig out of that comfortable rubble in which we had been sleeping. We are returning to our first principles to the "core ideas" on which our civilization and our politics had been constructed before. Here is one such idea: There is no such thing as Christian democracy notwithstanding the use of this phrase as a party name in Europe. There is likewise no such thing as Jewish democracy or Islamic democracy or Hindu or Buddhist or Shinto. Religion is a top-down thing it is in its nature dogmatic and revelatory and when it is legitimate it addresses the individual where he lives in his soul. We can speak of a Christian society or of some other kind and that is legitimate enough -- a society in which the great majority of people adhere at least nominally to a faith and its traditions. This gives everything a certain flavour puts the sap in the tree. It means the people themselves are Christian or whatever as much when they enter the voter's booth as when they step out of it again. Indeed a society that lacks some such common traditional religious ground is hardly an advance on one that has this. When for instance our government declares Canada is a multicultural society I think what they actually mean is Canada is a cultural vacuum that we are trying to fill . For "multi-culture" is an oxymoron. If they said Canada is pluralist they would mean something. We can be Christian and pluralist. Another country could be Islamic and pluralist. Instead I am referring to the hard core accomplishment of modernity -- what grew I think out of the British experiment in religious toleration and was expressed in the Scottish enlightenment of the 18th century. It was a realization that any religious organization which lays claim to earthly power has established itself as an earthly tyranny; that to the extent of its earthly claim it has forfeited its spiritual authority. It has ceased even to be a religion and become an ideology ceased to be a church and become a party. This was our modern rediscovery of the great truth implicit in that saying of Jesus Christ about which I was writing last week: "Render unto Caesar the things which be Caesar's and unto God the things which be God's." And to be Scotch missionary about this it is something that we now know in our bones something that we must teach the world and teach the world for its own safety. The West -- or more exactly the United States acting as our captain -- has just displaced a fanatic religious regime in Afghanistan. It was a regime that proved through its actions to be a successor to all the great secular tyrannies of the 20th century. The resemblance was masked because the ideology was religious rather than secular -- "Islamism" instead of Communism or Fascism. But it was Islam reduced to the terms of Communism or Fascism -- a stinking absolutist creed. The product was the same. Not only a virulent domestic tyranny but the attempt to export this tyranny by violence around the world. We see it as well in neighbouring regimes for instance in Saudi Arabia and Iran. Both of these remain threats to the world because both are possessed by an ideology that they will export by means fair or foul. Or rather by foul means only. The Saudi regime which from its foundations in the last century has embraced the simplistic Wahabi interpretation of Islam and which still declares itself to be the earthly wielder of Islam's sword has used its huge takings from the sale of oil to finance radical mosques and pay radical preachers to spread its message on every continent. It has used the oil to hold not only the world but Islam hostage to its creed. It is not in principle different from the Taliban only more worldly wise. The Iranian regime which took power a generation ago in the very Muslim country which next after Turkey had shown most promise of a permanent separation of mosque and state supports terror directly -- as we were reminded by the interception of a Palestinian ship on the high seas by Israel this last week loaded with rockets and high-tech explosives from the ayatollahs' extensive munitions factories. We have ourselves learned in pain relearned in pain the necessity of distinguishing church from state religion from democracy. Both are essential but we can never again allow them to be confused or allow a regime to survive that confuses them. And we are no more against Islam than against Christianity in making this demand. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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