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COMMENTARY
July 14, 2007
True to reason
Lee Harris is among the few living writers who do not, as the saying goes, “subtract from the sum total of human knowledge” with each new essay. I’ve puffed him before, and will puff him again, the more shamelessly in the knowledge that his new book, The Suicide of Reason, is probably not even available in Canada.As usual, Mr Harris is skiing uphill against the assumptions his American countrymen and others through the West have brought into the inaptly-named “war on terror.” We seem incapable of projecting ourselves, even cursorily, into the mind of our mortal enemy, and the language we use to describe him, even when it is not cowardly and politically correct (“supporters” of Al Qaeda, “militants,” etc.), conceals more than it reveals. Even in clearer, less compromised writing, the enemy is presented as un-adjectived “fanatics,” or “terrorists” -- which they are, but the terms do not get us any closer to their motivations. “Islamists” -- an abbreviation I use, and explain from time to time, and which has at least the virtue that it is acceptable to both the enemy himself, and most of that enemy’s Muslim critics -- is also ultimately misleading. With considerable decorum and restraint, Mr Harris goes to the trouble of reminding that it is impossible to present the tenets of the Taliban, Al Qaeda, Hamas, or the Muslim Brotherhood on the Sunni side; or of Hezbollah, Iraq’s blackshirts, or Iran’s revolutionary ayatollahs on the Shia side; as complete aberrations of Islam. They do quote Koran and Hadiths accurately enough, and they evoke a semi-legendary history of armed Jihad and conquest that resonates among unwesternized Muslim listeners. This is what makes the ideology of “Islamism” different in kind from Nazism and Communism, and will, over the coming decades or centuries, make it a more formidable opponent. For the great atheist-socialist ideologies of the 20th century worked against the grain of the societies upon which they preyed, and were for that reason easier to throw off. The deep Christian traditions of e.g. Germany, Italy, and Russia were against them from the beginning, and the claims they made on behalf of a new moral order -- inverted from the old -- struck the European mind as false and finally, uninspiring. Indeed, much of the work distracting Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, consisted of suppressing established institutions and apolitical groups in their own countries, that threatened to undermine them simply because they represented decency and civilization. And when the Nazis and Soviets, respectively, collapsed, they collapsed utterly. 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 the society on which it preys, 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 and exceptionalists, are peculiarly ill-equipped to defend against it. He does this by showing that Islam is not unique in creating a social order in which zealotry or “fanaticism” is a glue, rather than a solvent. For this has generally been true of non-Western societies, and was universally true of all tribal arrangements that preceded the development of urban culture. We are not dealing with an anomaly, as our use of that word “fanatic” would suggest, but with an alien social order that is perfectly viable on its own turf, and within its own terms, whose premises are entirely non-Western. 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 towards democracy and the rule of law. And there is no law of nature that ensures the triumph of reason over zealotry. Reason itself demands that we rethink the defence of reason. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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