The Enlightenment, which provides the foundation for our government, promoted the idea that all are created equal. This idea has gradually permeated the West so that now all adult citizens can vote. Moreover, it has led to the idea that people ought to be able to be free to speak their minds and free to practice (or not practice) whatever religion they liked.
It has also led to the idea that certain people who were formerly shunned as beyond the pale ought to be welcomed. Over the last two hundred years or so, we’ve seen how the Jews, for example, have become much more acceptable in Western society, even though our society is not predominantly Jewish.
Nevertheless, there was a big problem, a big boulder in the road along the way: the Holocaust. But not only did the Holocaust kill many people, not only did it represent a huge setback for the process of accepting people who are not part of the mainstream, it also had two ill effects on the most enlightened thinkers of the post-WWII era. First, it led them to denigrate the West. “We aren’t any better than any other culture,” such people now say, and they probably even add, “In fact, we are worse.” Accordingly, any attempt to talk about how horrible certain practices are among Muslim immigrants, such as honor killings or female genital mutilation, is basically met with a yawn.
The second ill effect is that such people have raised to an absolute, to the highest value possible, the idea that we must accept the Other no matter how repugnant that Other is. It is certainly enlightened to be accepting of the Other, but once we raise that idea to an absolute, to be our highest value, we end up crushing other values that we cherish.
But whether we want it or not, our era is now characterized as one in which acceptance of the Other is the highest value. Not to accept the Other, especially when the Other is a Muslim, is the highest sin. It is hard to see how such a value system will end in anything other than the establishing of shari‘a as the basis for all Western governments.
William Kirkpatrick in his book Christianity, Islam, and Atheism points the finger of blame at secularism for the situation we are in. He believes that abandoning Christianity is responsible [6], that secularism gives people nothing meaningful to pass on [6], that we don’t feel we have anything worth defending [6], that a secular society can’t fight a religious war [9], that Enlightenment values aren’t sturdy if they are cut off from Christianity [53], that what secularists promote (such as easy divorce and abortion) are a recipe for cultural suicide [237], and that once the Muslims take over, many leftists will convert [260].
He also has a long section criticizing those secularists who are atheists for having basically nothing to put in the place of Christianity that would make people resistant to Islam. This section begins on page 70, and as I mentioned yesterday, for me this was the best part of the book. He points out, for example, that promoting Darwinism means that we are trying to fight being a slave of Allah with being a slave of biology [73], which obviously isn’t going to work very well. Also, atheists like Christopher Hitchens believe that if we could just rid the world of the superstitions of religion, everyone would see that life is purposeless and meaningless, and then we would be able to fight the advance of Islam [72-3]. Obviously, that depressing viewpoint isn't going to work, either.
When talking about Hitchens, he first praises him for his willingness to criticize Muslims, but then in a passage reminiscent of David Hume’s complaint about our inability to derive an “ought” from an “is,” he says that although there are many “shoulds,” “oughts,” and “thou shall nots” implicit in his writings, it is not at all clear what basic moral foundation they come from [73]. Darwinism seems the best bet, yet Darwinism has first of all been used to justify Nazism [74] and anyway for some social environments here on earth, one’s best bet for survival is to remain ignorant and superstitious [73]. It’s just not obvious that Darwinism is going to lead us out of this mess.
These are all heavy charges, but I don’t think they stand up. They don’t stand up for the simple reason that we know, even if there is ultimately nothing supporting secularist ethics, that secularists can and do fight vehemently for what seems important to them. Remember how the feminists at Harvard went after Larry Summers for some trifling feminist sin? Get feminists of the West stirred up at the Muslims, and it’s game over for their attempt to impose shari‘a on us. Ditto if gays get stirred up.
No, the problem with secularism isn’t that it makes people refrain from defending the West. The problem is what I mentioned above, that certain values – multiculturalism and cultural relativism – have overwhelmed other values the left has. I’m assuming this is a temporary problem and that it is caused by another problem I mentioned yesterday: that secularists have misjudged the power situation. Most secularists seem to believe that Christianity is still a huge force in the West when in fact it isn’t. As Kirkpatrick points out, in England there are full mosques and empty churches, but even here in America where we have full churches, Christianity is a shadow of what it was when I was a child in the 1950s and 1960s. An article in the most recent issue of the religious magazine First Things (“Reflections on the Revolution in Rome,” by Kenneth L. Woordward, p. 26) reminds us of what it was like back then, when a book by a Christian theologian (Hans Küng) could become a bestseller .
And let me also add that although a dominant strain in secularism today sees the West as worse than the rest [80], that isn’t a necessary conclusion of secularism or leftism. I have always known that things are worse in the rest of the world, and I’m sure there are plenty of liberals and leftists who agree with me. The group that feels we are the worst has taken over, but for many of us that hasn’t seemed worth fighting, till now. Likewise, since there is no particular reason to think the Holocaust was caused by Enlightenment values, there is no reason to assume that, to the extent that the West is enlightened, it is worse than the rest of the world.
Let me also say that there is what I take to be a natural secularist reaction to Islam in our times, the reaction that I and a few other liberal and leftists have had, namely a reaction of resistance. For me this started when I observed what happened in the aftermath of the Iranian revolution. A revolution that was supposed to end in a secular and socialist government instead ended up with a reactionary theocracy. Furthermore, many liberals and leftists were murdered by the new regime. When people in some other group are murdering people in your group, the natural reaction is to oppose that other group. How many Jews supported the Nazis? Almost none.
After this event came the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. I had two reactions to this. The first was the realization that reactionary Muslims wanted to rule us. That wouldn’t have meant anything, except that my fellow liberals and leftists simply shrugged it off. An event that horrified me seemed to make no impression on them whatsoever. Everything has gone downhill since then. I’m convinced that noisy demonstrations on Rushdie’s behalf would have spared us a lot of problems.
Finally, though this merely confirmed what I already knew, there was the murder of Theo van Gogh. Notice I’m not mentioning 9/11, for the simple reason that I’m recounting the sins of Muslim extremists against the left and not against ordinary people in the West. The track record of such people, from a leftist point of view, is extremely poor. Leftists today are pouring their energies into helping people who simply don’t deserve it. It has even clouded their judgments about people so that Ayaan Hirsi Ali is considered on the right, while Tariq Ramadan is considered a moderate.
Anyway, we’ve seen an episode like this before in leftist history: the Nazi-Soviet pact. I hadn’t thought much about this pact when I was an ordinary leftist, but once I became self-critical and began reading lots of things I hadn’t read before, I realized that it was an awfully strange and unnatural thing for leftists to do. David Horowitz in his book Radical Son talks of how the left’s rhetoric changed once that pact was in place, that whereas formerly the left had disparaged the Nazis, suddenly they were defending them. Once the Nazis broke the pact, the rhetoric returned to what it had been before [29, 62-3]. I’d like to think that leftists will come to their senses before too long regarding the Muslim problem, but I freely admit that according to my reckoning, they should never have reacted this way in the first place.
So, what do I know?
Let me conclude by observing that multiculturalism here in America isn’t even very pure. As I pointed out endlessly in my book on soccer (pictured to the right), American multiculturalists, when confronted with the sport of the Other, went scurrying back to the safety of American sports.
This should be another arrow in the quiver of those who attack multiculturalism, since the fact that those who promote it can’t even adopt it in full means that the rest of the population shouldn’t have to adopt it even in part.
It has also led to the idea that certain people who were formerly shunned as beyond the pale ought to be welcomed. Over the last two hundred years or so, we’ve seen how the Jews, for example, have become much more acceptable in Western society, even though our society is not predominantly Jewish.
Nevertheless, there was a big problem, a big boulder in the road along the way: the Holocaust. But not only did the Holocaust kill many people, not only did it represent a huge setback for the process of accepting people who are not part of the mainstream, it also had two ill effects on the most enlightened thinkers of the post-WWII era. First, it led them to denigrate the West. “We aren’t any better than any other culture,” such people now say, and they probably even add, “In fact, we are worse.” Accordingly, any attempt to talk about how horrible certain practices are among Muslim immigrants, such as honor killings or female genital mutilation, is basically met with a yawn.
The second ill effect is that such people have raised to an absolute, to the highest value possible, the idea that we must accept the Other no matter how repugnant that Other is. It is certainly enlightened to be accepting of the Other, but once we raise that idea to an absolute, to be our highest value, we end up crushing other values that we cherish.
But whether we want it or not, our era is now characterized as one in which acceptance of the Other is the highest value. Not to accept the Other, especially when the Other is a Muslim, is the highest sin. It is hard to see how such a value system will end in anything other than the establishing of shari‘a as the basis for all Western governments.
William Kirkpatrick in his book Christianity, Islam, and Atheism points the finger of blame at secularism for the situation we are in. He believes that abandoning Christianity is responsible [6], that secularism gives people nothing meaningful to pass on [6], that we don’t feel we have anything worth defending [6], that a secular society can’t fight a religious war [9], that Enlightenment values aren’t sturdy if they are cut off from Christianity [53], that what secularists promote (such as easy divorce and abortion) are a recipe for cultural suicide [237], and that once the Muslims take over, many leftists will convert [260].
He also has a long section criticizing those secularists who are atheists for having basically nothing to put in the place of Christianity that would make people resistant to Islam. This section begins on page 70, and as I mentioned yesterday, for me this was the best part of the book. He points out, for example, that promoting Darwinism means that we are trying to fight being a slave of Allah with being a slave of biology [73], which obviously isn’t going to work very well. Also, atheists like Christopher Hitchens believe that if we could just rid the world of the superstitions of religion, everyone would see that life is purposeless and meaningless, and then we would be able to fight the advance of Islam [72-3]. Obviously, that depressing viewpoint isn't going to work, either.
When talking about Hitchens, he first praises him for his willingness to criticize Muslims, but then in a passage reminiscent of David Hume’s complaint about our inability to derive an “ought” from an “is,” he says that although there are many “shoulds,” “oughts,” and “thou shall nots” implicit in his writings, it is not at all clear what basic moral foundation they come from [73]. Darwinism seems the best bet, yet Darwinism has first of all been used to justify Nazism [74] and anyway for some social environments here on earth, one’s best bet for survival is to remain ignorant and superstitious [73]. It’s just not obvious that Darwinism is going to lead us out of this mess.
These are all heavy charges, but I don’t think they stand up. They don’t stand up for the simple reason that we know, even if there is ultimately nothing supporting secularist ethics, that secularists can and do fight vehemently for what seems important to them. Remember how the feminists at Harvard went after Larry Summers for some trifling feminist sin? Get feminists of the West stirred up at the Muslims, and it’s game over for their attempt to impose shari‘a on us. Ditto if gays get stirred up.
No, the problem with secularism isn’t that it makes people refrain from defending the West. The problem is what I mentioned above, that certain values – multiculturalism and cultural relativism – have overwhelmed other values the left has. I’m assuming this is a temporary problem and that it is caused by another problem I mentioned yesterday: that secularists have misjudged the power situation. Most secularists seem to believe that Christianity is still a huge force in the West when in fact it isn’t. As Kirkpatrick points out, in England there are full mosques and empty churches, but even here in America where we have full churches, Christianity is a shadow of what it was when I was a child in the 1950s and 1960s. An article in the most recent issue of the religious magazine First Things (“Reflections on the Revolution in Rome,” by Kenneth L. Woordward, p. 26) reminds us of what it was like back then, when a book by a Christian theologian (Hans Küng) could become a bestseller .
And let me also add that although a dominant strain in secularism today sees the West as worse than the rest [80], that isn’t a necessary conclusion of secularism or leftism. I have always known that things are worse in the rest of the world, and I’m sure there are plenty of liberals and leftists who agree with me. The group that feels we are the worst has taken over, but for many of us that hasn’t seemed worth fighting, till now. Likewise, since there is no particular reason to think the Holocaust was caused by Enlightenment values, there is no reason to assume that, to the extent that the West is enlightened, it is worse than the rest of the world.
Let me also say that there is what I take to be a natural secularist reaction to Islam in our times, the reaction that I and a few other liberal and leftists have had, namely a reaction of resistance. For me this started when I observed what happened in the aftermath of the Iranian revolution. A revolution that was supposed to end in a secular and socialist government instead ended up with a reactionary theocracy. Furthermore, many liberals and leftists were murdered by the new regime. When people in some other group are murdering people in your group, the natural reaction is to oppose that other group. How many Jews supported the Nazis? Almost none.
After this event came the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. I had two reactions to this. The first was the realization that reactionary Muslims wanted to rule us. That wouldn’t have meant anything, except that my fellow liberals and leftists simply shrugged it off. An event that horrified me seemed to make no impression on them whatsoever. Everything has gone downhill since then. I’m convinced that noisy demonstrations on Rushdie’s behalf would have spared us a lot of problems.
Finally, though this merely confirmed what I already knew, there was the murder of Theo van Gogh. Notice I’m not mentioning 9/11, for the simple reason that I’m recounting the sins of Muslim extremists against the left and not against ordinary people in the West. The track record of such people, from a leftist point of view, is extremely poor. Leftists today are pouring their energies into helping people who simply don’t deserve it. It has even clouded their judgments about people so that Ayaan Hirsi Ali is considered on the right, while Tariq Ramadan is considered a moderate.
Anyway, we’ve seen an episode like this before in leftist history: the Nazi-Soviet pact. I hadn’t thought much about this pact when I was an ordinary leftist, but once I became self-critical and began reading lots of things I hadn’t read before, I realized that it was an awfully strange and unnatural thing for leftists to do. David Horowitz in his book Radical Son talks of how the left’s rhetoric changed once that pact was in place, that whereas formerly the left had disparaged the Nazis, suddenly they were defending them. Once the Nazis broke the pact, the rhetoric returned to what it had been before [29, 62-3]. I’d like to think that leftists will come to their senses before too long regarding the Muslim problem, but I freely admit that according to my reckoning, they should never have reacted this way in the first place.
So, what do I know?
Let me conclude by observing that multiculturalism here in America isn’t even very pure. As I pointed out endlessly in my book on soccer (pictured to the right), American multiculturalists, when confronted with the sport of the Other, went scurrying back to the safety of American sports.
This should be another arrow in the quiver of those who attack multiculturalism, since the fact that those who promote it can’t even adopt it in full means that the rest of the population shouldn’t have to adopt it even in part.
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