Sunday, July 16, 2006
MARX, MUHAMMED and MORE
I'm continuing to get good comments on the "Marx and Muhammed" post linked from Instapundit. Here are a couple and my initial responses:I agree that the Bush administration has done a very poor job of communicating about the war's causes and goals. The problem, I believe, is that the Bush administration specifically, and the Right generally, draws much of its power from religious sentiment in America. But much of the most important logic behind the West's position in this war is the power of of the secular Enlightenment. So there's a fundamental disconnection between our leadership and the logic of our position of strength. Our leadership has to engage in the dissimulation of the "religion of peace" rhetoric because they believe (probably rightly) that they cannot attack the irrationality of religious faith as the motor of our enemies' hostility to us without inviting uncomfortable questions about their own religious faith. This realization has been one of the greatest causes of despair for me.It's definitely worth thinking and writing about the Islamic Challenge
Steve Grimaud writes:
You can't argue with faith, so there's no argument.
But they do argue. And write. Endlessly. Sayyid Qutb wrote a 30 volume commentary on the Koran, which has 114 chapters. I'd call this obsessive. But they do argue and attempt to persuade their fellow Muslims to follow the yellow brick road of jihad. They also rail against materialism, because that's so seductive to their fellow Muslims. The question is, do Muslims want to go on the path of permanent war and end up seeing millions or tens of millions of Muslims killed or do they want material progress?
That's why its important to defeat the jihadis and have the carrot of material
progress. That's why we need to argue against the ideas of jihad and make the choice clear to Muslims.
The Bushies have always been horrible [about] communication and understanding the importance of ideas. I've pulled my hair out at their failures in this area. Almost 5 years into the active part of the war and they're still not up to speed on this.
An Indian writer sends me the following comment:I found your short blog article via Instapundit. And I think you nailed down an accurrate description of the differences between Marxism and Islam and their resulting political movements.
What I would like to see is some further exploration on what you describe as the motivational appeal within Islam: an intangible, "imaginary" afterlife. If anything, I would say that most people on the planet at this time are motivated by the notion that there is an afterlife and a God who controls who goes where after death. Dare I say it, but within America and the West, there are many people (generally devout Christians) who feel that way, and they don't consider an afterlife or God imaginary. And whether or not their notions are imaginary, their beliefs do exert a strong influence on politics at all levels of human interaction. I think that because such a notion is not limited to Islam and is prominent even in liberal Western countries it should be examined more closely.
This is not to say that I do not find good things in Western liberalism--I do--yet because it is quite young as compared with established, major religions, I think it is also a bit premature to presume its superiority. Depopulation in affluent, industrialized countries has picked up momentum to the point that among people who study societies and demographics there is a growing consensus that Western liberalism may have an inalterable design flaw: it requires a religious society birth rate to maintain itself. And, in Hayekian terms, if Islam can maintain and preserve its culture and population and the West can't, would that not be something like the empirical evaluation you said people made of Marxism when they discovered it couldn't deliver the goods?
I'm sure this is right -- most humans still believe, more or less fervently, in an afterlife and one variety or another of supernatural superbeings that (on an unpredictable basis, apparently) interfere in the natural world and human affairs. And there does indeed seem to be a correlation between religious belief and human biological fertility: The more you believe, the more you reproduce. (Although I don't think enough work has been done to separate the effects of material prosperity from religious skepticism in reducing human biological fertility. For instance, while U.S. citizens are more religious than their European counterparts, they are far less fertile than people in highly religious, but also materially poor areas of the world.)
If mere numbers of people were the only determinant of success in cultural conflict, then the West would indeed be irretrievably doomed. The only hope is that the culture of the secular Enlightenment has power far beyond the numbers of people who hold its values. This is due to two factors. First, the scientific method, which is at the heart of Enlightenment culture, produces results in the material world at a far higher level of success than any other culture humanity has given birth to. If you are reading this, it's because of the Enlightenment. (How many scientific or technological advances have come out of the Muslim world in the last thousand years? Answer: Zero. How long did it take the Enlightenment to put humans on the moon or determine the fundamentals of biology? Answer: About 300 years.)
Second, societies that truly adopt liberal political and legal culture become extraordinarily creative compared to those governed by any other form of social organization. So, even though we are very few, we generate immense material power.
Is this enough for liberal values to triumph? The jury is still out. Stay tuned.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 1:06 PM
