The rise of fundamentalist Islam has perplexed and outraged the West for a few decades now. The prophesies all said the brown people would rejoice when the good thinkers welcomed Islam into the West. Instead, the muzzies have gone bonkers, rejecting the West and retreating into a medieval philosophy that rejects everything the West believes about the world.
I thought about that while reading this book review in the New York Review of Books. Why it is written by “anonymous” is a mystery to me. Maybe the Economist style is coming to America. It always seem to me that the propaganda arm of the custodial state should use that style. That way it is hard for the masses to dismiss the lectures. Anyway, the article is worth reading, but this bit is what got my attention:
The thinkers, tacticians, soldiers, and leaders of the movement we know as ISIS are not great strategists; their policies are often haphazard, reckless, even preposterous; regardless of whether their government is, as some argue, skillful, or as others imply, hapless, it is not delivering genuine economic growth or sustainable social justice. The theology, principles, and ethics of the ISIS leaders are neither robust nor defensible. Our analytical spade hits bedrock very fast.
I’m highlighting that bit as there was a time when using the phrase “social justice” would get you laughed out of most rooms. Even lefty outposts like the New York Review of Books would flinch at that phrase. That’s because everyone knew it was a ridiculous idea, held only by the naive and stupid. Today, “everyone knows” the point of government is social justice. Go figure.
Interestingly, the “genuine economic growth” line has crossed the street in my life as well. There was a time when only black-hearted right wingers talked about economic growth. Decent people understood that there was much more to life than money. Now, even the most fanatical Progressives thinks that every tree must grow to the sky, no matter what.
I have often been tempted to argue that we simply need more and better information. But that is to underestimate the alien and bewildering nature of this phenomenon. To take only one example, five years ago not even the most austere Salafi theorists advocated the reintroduction of slavery; but ISIS has in fact imposed it. Nothing since the triumph of the Vandals in Roman North Africa has seemed so sudden, incomprehensible, and difficult to reverse as the rise of ISIS. None of our analysts, soldiers, diplomats, intelligence officers, politicians, or journalists has yet produced an explanation rich enough—even in hindsight—to have predicted the movement’s rise.
I’ve argued often that American Progressive faith has a lot in common with Islam. Some of my comparisons are meant to be snarky, but there’s a lot of points of comparison. One area is the inward looking nature of the two faiths. Progressives fixate on communal salvation in the same way Muslims do, the two just have different ends.
The main difference is that Islam knows a lot about the West. Most people don’t know that Islam was the the center of intellectual life before the Mongols came calling. The Sack of Baghdad in 1258 is viewed as the point at which Islam fell behind the West and the East culturally. Muslim Arabs are well aware of this, having grown up in the shadow of the West, often living in the West.
We hide this from ourselves with theories and concepts that do not bear deep examination. And we will not remedy this simply through the accumulation of more facts. It is not clear whether our culture can ever develop sufficient knowledge, rigor, imagination, and humility to grasp the phenomenon of ISIS. But for now, we should admit that we are not only horrified but baffled.
I’ve come to think of Progressives as the decedents¹ of the Puritans for a number of reasons. The one reason important here is the inward looking nature of both Puritan and Progressive culture. The Puritans saw salvation as a community activity. Internal discipline and cohesion were paramount so they focused on it exclusively. A certain studied ignorance of the outside world was critical to maintain discipline. That’s a Progressive quality as well.
The result is the people in charge not only misunderstand the world beyond their understanding, they have no way of understanding it. To understand the draw of Islam to young Arabs, you need to consider the possibility that life in the West is not on the road to paradise. You also have to contemplate the possibility that there are many ways to be happy as a people.
The innate intolerance of Progressives prohibits this sort of speculation. There’s also the deep rooted belief that bad things happen to God’s people when those people fail in their duty as God’s servants. That means 9/11 was America’s fault for not abiding by the Progressive virtues. The rise of ISIS was due to bad US policy in the region (Bush). The muzzies lack agency of their own so they are not blamed.
That’s why Progressives are so vexed with ISIS. President Obama, peace be upon him, has been running policy in the region for a long time. Everything has been done properly and yet these people hate us as much, if not more, than they did in the Bush years. Their “analytical spade” hits bedrock very fast because it does not exist. They have not thought for a second that the Muslims could have a point of two to make.
¹Yes, that is on purpose.
Dutch,
I don’t have to go as far as HuffPo. My social media feeds are full of triumphalist posts from just a handful of progressive acquaintances. They’ve been on a rampage since teh ghey marriage was pronounced goodthinkfull (transnormative people are our allies, we’ve always been at war with cisnormal deviants). None of it is consistent, most of it was written by some paid propagandist somewhere; and when accompanied by some personal thought, it is almost always insulting and demeaning. There are some only about three individuals doing most of the posting, but man are they consuming a lot of bandwidth.
Maybe more alarming are the more cowardly among my friends and acquaintances (not surprised by who they are, just by how quickly they jumped on the bandwagon) who are now writing posts along the lines of “of course I have always agreed with the general line of the party and followed the guidance of the collective leadership with fastidious care… why do you ask comrade?”
The bright side of all this? Now I know who some of the chekists and potential informers are among a big slice of my acquaintances. We have to find joy in the little things, right?
I think that Puritan DNA is in everyone, conservatives included. Your point that “there are many ways to be happy as a people” runs into American obstinacy (and maybe some “studied ignorance of the world”) and produces the “Democracy Uber Alles” attitude.
The idea that some countries have kings, and some countries have chiefs, and some things aren’t even really countries, but the people like it fine because that’s the way it’s always been, is regarded with horror, if it’s even acknowledged at all. “Kings? George III!” is the frankly parochial response, and any appeal to the foreigners’ history and tradition falls on deaf ears.
George Bush was as pigheaded as any Progressive in slapping the patent medicine of Democracy onto Iraq and Afghanistan, and then sitting back and expecting the magic to work. I still don’t think he could bring himself to admit that the whole idea was idiotic.
Visit one of the prominent Progressive sites and wade through the comments section. I dare you. Through links I recently looked at a Daily Koz article on Schumer. The comments section was like a thousand street corners with a thousand crazies shouting out to no one in particular. To the extent that these people represent Progressive thought, the entire movement is irredeemable. There is no thinking, only emoting. There is no logic, only the positioning of self within the priorities of the club. The club itself seems to have no particular goals, other than to obliterate any thought or action not in accordance with their own. In comparison with these people, ISIS is rational, predictable, and their world view has it’s own twisted coherence. To the extent that the Progressives populate our political and social space, we appear to be doomed. How can we deal with existential external threats, when prominent parts of our own society are living under such delusions? Honestly, I have no idea how any of those Progressive commenters would have any ability to work in a structured environment such as a Taco Bell, let alone any workplace that demands higher levels of competency and personal discipline.
Z- man,
I can’t understand why the right hasn’t used the Crusades to spank the left. First, they were purely defensive. Things had gotten so bad that the Italians had to hire Normans to kick the Arabs out of Sicily. Second, the lands the Crusaders took had been traditionally oriented to the Hellenistic civilization and (always subject to debate) big swaths were still majority Christian. Plus the problem in the Levant at the time of the Crusades wasn’t the Arabs at this point, it was the Turks, who were breaking all the old understandings and propagating all manner of persecutions at this point in time.
Everything in the progressive narrative about the crusades is false. Any remotely historically literate politician could easily debunk the narrative. The problem is that we haven’t had a historically literate pol since Truman.
I think the Right has largely given up. I’ve come to think of the Reagan years and the surge of conservatism as a last gasp of Old America. American from the founding until the Civil War was ruled by a coalition of the South, Midlands and Appalachian people. Things flipped over slavery and those Midland populations went over to the North, which went on to crush the old Royalist South. The Snopes clan eventually filled the void and dominate the South today. The Yankee war on them got going in the middle of the last century and is in its end phases now.
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That Progressives can’t understand ISIS should be no mystery.
Progressives are uninformed by HBD.
Their multi-culti beliefs depend on this.
They have never heard of Lynn and Vanhanen.
They, out of hand, reject Nicholas Wade’s: ‘A Troublesome Inheritance,
Genes, Race and Human History’ and they have disappeared him.
The same for Jason Richwine’s work, Derbyshire, et al.
The Progressive believes that all problems have a solution and
that humans are fungible, like Lego blocks.
They imagine that you can replace European-America with 100 million Mestizos, Somalis, etc and everything will work out jess’ fine.
Growing up in the ’50s, America then called itself a ‘melting pot’.
Somewhere along the line it became ‘multi-cultural’.
Then the ‘melting pot’ morphed into the ‘great mosaic’ because
it became obvious that melting was no longer happening.
So now instead, we ‘celebrate diversity’.
Churchill had it right with his prophetic comments in ‘The River War’
written in 1899 – ISIS would be no mystery to Churchill.
We’ve gotten much stupider since then.
“How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia
in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy.
The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live.
A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement;
the next of its dignity and sanctity.
The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property – either as a child, a wife, or a concubine – must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities.
Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen: all know how to die: but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it.
No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome.”[5]:248–250
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Which of these are more complex: Quantum Mechanics, General Relativity or your kitchen sink? Trick question. It’s your kitchen sink.
There are some things that are impossible to understand. Among these are alien societies. Watch “Victory at Sea”, episode 25. You will see films of Japanese women, babies in their arms, jumping from cliffs into the sea to avoid capture by American forces. These actions are incomprehensible to a western mind.
The Islamic world is seventh century tribalism in amber. The west does not have the referents or the experience to comprehend their world. It is classic cognitive dissonance.
Maybe your kitchen sink is more complex. I can fix mine if necessary. I can’t, however, do anything to manage Relativity, even less than that on Quantum Mechanics.
One of the issues surrounding the rise of ISIS (or ISIL or whatever the current name is) is how dozens of muslims who live comfortably in the west are so eager to leave their homes and head to Syria to either have sex with the bearded AK-47 carriers or use the weapon themselves. I can only conclude the AK-47 has turned out to be the sexiest thing ever seen in those parts.
On a slightly more serious note, we must assume it is easy for muslims living in the west to turn their back on the carnival of democracy because for all the free benefit payments and soft-soaping and gentle ‘love’ offered by our intellectuals and opinion-makers, the islamic mob don’t give flying poo about anything we have to offer. From that it gives rise to the idea that those that remain then are either waiting to join them or waiting to welcome back the hordes once they are properly trained.
Again, not a subject that the west likes to consider, but as we are continually surprised by how the world is, we don’t seem to consider much these days.
We could just kill them. Now don’t tell me that we already tried that and it didn’t work. I mean really kill them.. it worked in Japan
It’s not so far fetched. Iran is dying to get a bomb of their own, so what do they have in mind? You can be so intellectual and understand history and the rise of ISIS and this is all good for eggheads and blog writers or maybe just kill them which is also intellectual. You may ask “and what will that solve?” Nothing really, they’d still hate us (but not any more than they do now) but it would kick the can another hundred years.
This is the Third Jihad. The West ignoring this at its peril, has become a soft, sad bastardization of its former muscular self. The West seems to have lost the ability or at least the strength of will, to defend against Islam and its barbaric, enslaving “culture”. Europe has been overrun, and we are well on our way. We might turn the tide in the U.S. at some point in the future. In our favor: we’re armed.
A few years ago some wonk from the policy world came up with the idea of the “functioning core” and “non-integrating gap” to explain how.it.all.worked. The elites ate it up because he naturally made Euro-American civilization the functioning core that all of the rest were being absorbed into.
He completely missed that there are other functioning cores like China, Shiism, Sunni-ism, etc. You are dead on in saying that they are not functioning quite the way the progs would would like them to, but they function, they provide unifying cultural thought, and they are adapting. Huntington was much closer to the truth in his Clash of Civilizations book.
Interesting that the Caliphate (ISIS) is doing precisely what the Koran, the Hadith, and the Sirah say Mohammed and the Companions did. The Cult cannot admit that since to go down that road is to admit that Islam is unreformable. We always seem to forget that Luther stripped away the Catholic traditions that overlay the Gospels and other New Testament writings. He did not claim to be changing the meaning of the Gospels and epistles, he claimed to be returning to their original meaning, hence “Sola Scriptura.” “Reformed” Islam is Salafism and its allied sects: brutal, regressive, and militant.
I was reading about the Mongol sacking of Baghdad. Hulagu the Mongol leader was not the sort to take no for an answer. Historians estimate that he killed 800,000 people in the siege and sacking. The Mongols inflicted far more damage on Islam than the crusaders from Christendom. Yet, I doubt many US policy makers or their intellectual advisers ever think about this part of the history of Islam.