[lit-ideas] Re: Ideology vs Experience
- From: Eric Yost <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2006 14:36:41 -0400
>>the idea isn't to turn honey bees into hornets.
[excerpted from]
Head-in-the-Sand Liberals
Western civilization really is at risk from Muslim extremists.
By Sam Harris
September 18, 2006
Perhaps I should establish my liberal bone fides at the
outset. I'd like to see taxes raised on the wealthy, drugs
decriminalized and homosexuals free to marry. I also think
that the Bush administration deserves most of the criticism
it has received in the last six years — especially with
respect to its waging of the war in Iraq, its scuttling of
science and its fiscal irresponsibility.
But my correspondence with liberals has convinced me that
liberalism has grown dangerously out of touch with the
realities of our world — specifically with what devout
Muslims actually believe about the West, about paradise and
about the ultimate ascendance of their faith.
On questions of national security, I am now as wary of my
fellow liberals as I am of the religious demagogues on the
Christian right.
This may seem like frank acquiescence to the charge that
"liberals are soft on terrorism." It is, and they are.
A cult of death is forming in the Muslim world — for reasons
that are perfectly explicable in terms of the Islamic
doctrines of martyrdom and jihad. The truth is that we are
not fighting a "war on terror." We are fighting a
pestilential theology and a longing for paradise.
This is not to say that we are at war with all Muslims. But
we are absolutely at war with those who believe that death
in defense of the faith is the highest possible good, that
cartoonists should be killed for caricaturing the prophet
and that any Muslim who loses his faith should be butchered
for apostasy.
Unfortunately, such religious extremism is not as fringe a
phenomenon as we might hope. Numerous studies have found
that the most radicalized Muslims tend to have
better-than-average educations and economic opportunities.
Given the degree to which religious ideas are still
sheltered from criticism in every society, it is actually
possible for a person to have the economic and intellectual
resources to build a nuclear bomb — and to believe that he
will get 72 virgins in paradise. And yet, despite abundant
evidence to the contrary, liberals continue to imagine that
Muslim terrorism springs from economic despair, lack of
education and American militarism.
At its most extreme, liberal denial has found expression in
a growing subculture of conspiracy theorists who believe
that the atrocities of 9/11 were orchestrated by our own
government. A nationwide poll conducted by the Scripps
Survey Research Center at Ohio University found that more
than a third of Americans suspect that the federal
government "assisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or took
no action to stop them so the United States could go to war
in the Middle East;" 16% believe that the twin towers
collapsed not because fully-fueled passenger jets smashed
into them but because agents of the Bush administration had
secretly rigged them to explode.
Such an astonishing eruption of masochistic unreason could
well mark the decline of liberalism, if not the decline of
Western civilization. There are books, films and conferences
organized around this phantasmagoria, and they offer an
unusually clear view of the debilitating dogma that lurks at
the heart of liberalism: Western power is utterly
malevolent, while the powerless people of the Earth can be
counted on to embrace reason and tolerance, if only given
sufficient economic opportunities.
I don't know how many more engineers and architects need to
blow themselves up, fly planes into buildings or saw the
heads off of journalists before this fantasy will dissipate.
The truth is that there is every reason to believe that a
terrifying number of the world's Muslims now view all
political and moral questions in terms of their affiliation
with Islam. This leads them to rally to the cause of other
Muslims no matter how sociopathic their behavior. This
benighted religious solidarity may be the greatest problem
facing civilization and yet it is regularly misconstrued,
ignored or obfuscated by liberals.
Given the mendacity and shocking incompetence of the Bush
administration — especially its mishandling of the war in
Iraq — liberals can find much to lament in the conservative
approach to fighting the war on terror. Unfortunately,
liberals hate the current administration with such fury that
they regularly fail to acknowledge just how dangerous and
depraved our enemies in the Muslim world are.
Recent condemnations of the Bush administration's use of the
phrase "Islamic fascism" are a case in point. There is no
question that the phrase is imprecise — Islamists are not
technically fascists, and the term ignores a variety of
schisms that exist even among Islamists — but it is by no
means an example of wartime propaganda, as has been
repeatedly alleged by liberals.
In their analyses of U.S. and Israeli foreign policy,
liberals can be relied on to overlook the most basic moral
distinctions. For instance, they ignore the fact that
Muslims intentionally murder noncombatants, while we and the
Israelis (as a rule) seek to avoid doing so. Muslims
routinely use human shields, and this accounts for much of
the collateral damage we and the Israelis cause; the
political discourse throughout much of the Muslim world,
especially with respect to Jews, is explicitly and
unabashedly genocidal.
Given these distinctions, there is no question that the
Israelis now hold the moral high ground in their conflict
with Hamas and Hezbollah. And yet liberals in the United
States and Europe often speak as though the truth were
otherwise.
We are entering an age of unchecked nuclear proliferation
and, it seems likely, nuclear terrorism. There is,
therefore, no future in which aspiring martyrs will make
good neighbors for us. Unless liberals realize that there
are tens of millions of people in the Muslim world who are
far scarier than Dick Cheney, they will be unable to protect
civilization from its genuine enemies.
Increasingly, Americans will come to believe that the only
people hard-headed enough to fight the religious lunatics of
the Muslim world are the religious lunatics of the West.
Indeed, it is telling that the people who speak with the
greatest moral clarity about the current wars in the Middle
East are members of the Christian right, whose infatuation
with biblical prophecy is nearly as troubling as the
ideology of our enemies. Religious dogmatism is now playing
both sides of the board in a very dangerous game.
While liberals should be the ones pointing the way beyond
this Iron Age madness, they are rendering themselves
increasingly irrelevant. Being generally reasonable and
tolerant of diversity, liberals should be especially
sensitive to the dangers of religious literalism. But they
aren't.
The same failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe,
where the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular
Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious
extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most
sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are
actually fascists.
To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an
understatement: It does not bode well for the future of
civilization.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-harris18sep18,0,1897169.story
------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
Other related posts: