What the West Is Up Against

A few days ago, I posted a passage (here) from Paul Berman’s book Terror and Liberalism that I thought ought to be more widely known. Now I want to continue with this practice by posting a passage from Nick Cohen’s Waiting for the Etonians. This is a book of some of his essays from various British magazines, and the essay whose passage I want to post is from Arena, January 2008, and is entitled “Martin Amis Meets Liberal London”:

When liberal intellectuals go one of their periodic berserkers, the targets of their rage experience three emotions. The first is astonishment as men and women who boast of their independence of mind turn into a gang of screeching children. Outrage follows as they hear supposedly respectable academics and journalists propagate demonstrable lies. Finally, they settle into a steady contempt, as they realize that many liberal intellectuals are neither liberal nor noticeably intelligent.

Neutral observers watching Martin Amis at the Institute of Contemporary Arts realized that he had reached the serene terminus of the emotional journey. He sat toying with a transgressive cigarette while all around him a herd of otherwise thoughtful people went wild.

The spark in this instance was Amis’s claim that radical Islam is worse than America. He and comedian Chris Morris sparred over the Muslim Brotherhood, regarding whether they had a murderous ideology (as Amis insisted and which Morris apparently refused to acknowledge) and whether they were all murderers (which Morris kept trying to get Amis to make a fool of himself by acknowledging).

This continued for some time, but Amis strove to find some common ground.

During his talk he had tried to get through to his audience of anti-sexists and anti-racists by warning them that the West had “become nervous about making a judgement about anything at all, and unable to identify anything that is clearly bad in itself.

“I want to put this question to you: Do you feel morally superior to the Taliban? Hands up who does.”

Only a third raised their arms. [pp. 159-60]

Keep in mind that the people who didn’t raise their hands are not on the margins of society. They are not invisible and powerless. They are the ones who control our media and schools. They are the ones who have the power to help shape how the public sees things, and it is only those members of the public who want to be independent of their influence (by, say, using the Internet to get news) who escape. If these people can’t even manage to feel that they are morally superior to the Taliban, what sort of policies are they likely to promote? Certainly, ones that aren’t likely to do any good.

Comments

[Alrenous]

Uh oh! You've given me an opportunity to say something epistemological that's been bothering me for forever.

Sample bias. If you don't first ask, "Who has arms?" Then you don't know if a person who didn't raise their hand was voting against, or was just lazy.

Also I want to see someone actually ask, "Okay, raise your hands: everyone who has arms," because I think it would be funny to watch how few people do.

[John Pepple]

That's right, go all Cartesian on me. :)

More seriously, I can imagine that if he'd asked how many of them thought George Bush was evil, they all would have eagerly raised their hands.