Ayaan Hirsi Ali on Lee Harris

You can't say the forces of freedom are making no progress when, of all places, the New York Times allows Ayaan Hirsi Ali to review Lee Harris' new book, The Suicide of Reason. Here's a bit of her review:

Harris extols American exceptionalism together with Hegel as if there were no contradiction between the two. But what makes America unique, especially in contrast to Europe, is its resistance to the philosophy of Hegel with its concept of a unifying world spirit. It is the individual that matters most in the United States. And more generally, it is individuals who make cultures and who break them. Social and cultural evolution has always relied on individuals — to reform, persuade, cajole or force. Culture is formed by the collective agreement of individuals. At the same time, it is crucial that we not fall into the trap of assuming that the survival tactics of individuals living in tribal societies — like lying, hypocrisy, secrecy, violence, intimidation, and so forth — are in the interest of the modern individual or his culture.

I was not born in the West. I was raised with the code of Islam, and from birth I was indoctrinated into a tribal mind-set. Yet I have changed, I have adopted the values of the Enlightenment, and as a result I have to live with the rejection of my native clan as well as the Islamic tribe. Why have I done so? Because in a tribal society, life is cruel and terrible. And I am not alone. Muslims have been migrating to the West in droves for decades now. They are in search of a better life. Yet their tribal and cultural constraints have traveled with them. And the multiculturalism and moral relativism that reign in the West have accommodated this.

Harris is correct, I believe, that many Western leaders are terribly confused about the Islamic world. They are woefully uninformed and often unwilling to confront the tribal nature of Islam. The problem, however, is not too much reason but too little. Harris also fails to address the enemies of reason within the West: religion and the Romantic movement. It is out of rejection of religion that the Enlightenment emerged; Romanticism was a revolt against reason.

Both the Romantic movement and organized religion have contributed a great deal to the arts and to the spirituality of the Western mind, but they share a hostility to modernity. Moral and cultural relativism (and their popular manifestation, multiculturalism) are the hallmarks of the Romantics. To argue that reason is the mother of the current mess the West is in is to miss the major impact this movement has had, first in the West and perhaps even more profoundly outside the West, particularly in Muslim lands.

Thus, it is not reason that accommodates and encourages the persistent segregation and tribalism of immigrant Muslim populations in the West. It is Romanticism. Multiculturalism and moral relativism promote an idealization of tribal life and have shown themselves to be impervious to empirical criticism. My reasons for reproaching today’s Western leaders are different from Harris’s. I see them squandering a great and vital opportunity to compete with the agents of radical Islam for the minds of Muslims, especially those within their borders. But to do so, they must allow reason to prevail over sentiment.

I think Ali is right that we have to engage in a war for the minds of Muslims (but also for those in the West trapped in the irrationalities of White Guilt) and that over time we will find that more and more of them will want to be free like Ali, and not slaves to traditional forms of society, especially when they see that is not tribalism that can hope to feed them and keep them comfortable and healthy, but only our global modernity, without which the human population must greatly diminish.

However, Ali, and perhaps also Harris, though I haven't yet read his book, continues to pit reason against faith in objectionable ways. Of course there is a lot in the Western tradition of unreason to oppose. This blog never tires of berating the Gnostic left and its incoherent preaching on multiculturalism, for example. However, Ali seems to be largely unaware of how Western individualism has been in good part an outgrowth of Judeo-Christian religion, and Romanticism, and not simply of the "Enlightenment" which is best understood as a secularization or codification of what has always been a potential of a Western religious tradition that separates the moral and (the tribal) ethical, emphasizes individual moral conscience and conversation with God, as well as a history of progressive, unfolding revelations into our humanity to be discovered in human time. Furthermore, ours is a religion that, especially in the case of Christianity, calls on us to maximize human reciprocity, to see individuals as sacred centres/traders in their own right, freed of any particular social hierarchy or periphery, in a way that has led us to the free global market of secular modernity.

Similarly, the Romantic movement cannot be seriously summed up with a one-sided, good or bad, polemic, however much violence has arisen from it, both in the form of leftist political movements and resentful individuals defining their humanity against "the system" or the establishment. The modern individual, who uses the arts of consumer society, and also some reason, to endlessly differentiate individual sacred centres within a larger free market modernity, is as much a Romantic figure as is the anti-modern philobarbarist or supporter of one or another totalitarian fantasy. Furthermore, Romantic interest in the primitive can be a form of anthropology, a mix of reasoning and art that attempts a better understanding of our human origins, an improved understanding that can have liberating potential in our modernity. It is all too simple to see Romanticism across the board as an unquestioning embrace of the primitive.

It is incumbent on us to work through such contradictory possibilities in the major intellectual and artistic currents of the modern West, to foster the positive forces therein, so as to defend our modernity. This defense cannot be seriously achieved by those who would simply write off large parts of our cultural heritage as unreasonable. The Enlightenment's caricature of Reason is not alone the salvation of anything. It leads to forms of positivism which become crude Gnostic religions in their own right: see Marxism, or the French Revolution, for example, where reason and romanticism embraced in ways I don't think Ali yet knows how to separate.

I greatly admire Ayaan Hirsi Ali for showing the West what Islam is, for being a whistle blower, an informer, for insisting we hear the kind of stories that can only come from those who have lived under the oppressive tribal codes of the Islamic world. And while she seems to be someone whose escape from Islam has left her faithless and unsure how to deal with the human need for good faith, as the guarantee of our freedom, of our ability to perform for others an act of good faith, an acting that "reason" alone will never conquer, she may at least give us the courage to fight harder against those, like Mohamed Elmasry, who are actively targeting the forces of freedom in the West, as in Elmasry's recent campaign to silence Mark Steyn, or to make him unpublishable in Canada. Elmasry is the man who was widely quoted in the media for claiming that the murder of Aqsa Parvez was just a "teenager issue":

"I don't want the public to think that this is really an Islamic issue or an immigrant issue," said Mohamed Elmasry of the Canadian Islamic Congress. "It is a teenager issue."

Thanks to voices like Hirsi Ali's, fewer and fewer Canadians are falling for such rhetorical sleights of hand. Islam is an inherent part of certain tribal societies and tribal society is arguably an inherent part of Islam, though whether there can be some kind of accommodation of Islam and modernity remains to be seen. We will only begin the serious work of finding out what can and cannot be made of Islam and modernity when we stop listening to and appeasing the anti-freedom Islamists like Elmasry, who is invited to all kinds of conferences by leftist Canadian elites, and champion those Muslims who so desperately want greater freedom for their people. Ali has rejected Islam, others are trying to reform it. Let that debate play out, let's give our attention to those Muslims interested in change and progress, and not in a defense of tribalism masked as a denial that Islam is profoundly allied with tribalism.

The debate we need will be well served if we renew our interest in Western culture and history so that it does not become a sources of easy polemics and caricatures for those fighting for freedom and modernity. We only really defend freedom and modernity when we are not unnecessarily casting out parts of it, but grasping the greater mystery by which so much has and can be held together as a network of free individuals making their lives sacred in any number of ways.

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Feminists and Multiculturalists: A Failure to Covenant Part II

Covenant Zone meets every Thursday, 7-9pm, in the atrium of the central branch of the Vancouver Public Library, in front of Blenz Coffee. Look for the blue scarves. Please join us if you would like to discuss the health of the Canadian national covenant. Some potential material for discussion follows:

Don't watch this video unless you are prepared to witness acts of extreme violence towards women, a revelation into life for women under Islam (ht: Suicide of the West):


Writing about the murder of Aqsa Parvez, Barbara Kay argues:

We have this week two news items of tragedies involving girl victims. Both will serve to reinforce the belief of many Canadians -- count me in -- that the alliance of feminism with multiculturalism has created a two-tier sisterhood.

The top tier, Western women, have achieved full equality rights. Any and all male aggression against a top-tier woman triggers a public outcry and a million lit candles. The second-tier women -- those from other cultures -- are not so fortunate. Feminists exploit multiculturalism to justify their moral abandonment of the women who most need them: girl victims of dysfunctional or socially unevolved cultures
[...]
Multiculturalists would have us believe that the hijab is merely a religious symbol, like the Sikh kirpan or the Christian cross, freely embraced by the girls wearing them. It isn't, as many Muslim commentators, including Tarek Fatah and Farzana Hassan in these pages yesterday, have frequently explained. The hijab is rather a public sign of supervised sexual modesty, and marks those wearing it as chattel, leashed to their fathers and brothers as surely as if they were wearing a dog collar.

But you'll never hear a feminist murmur a word of complaint about these girls' lack of autonomy

Athos notes:

Ostensibly [Islam] claims revelation that supersedes both Judaism and Christianity; surreptitiously, Islam is a petulant, chip-on-its-shoulder "negative imitation" of both, always cocking an eye to see its model-rival in near-hilarious attraction/revulsion ... if it weren't so murderous.

But like all conventional expressions of the primitive Sacred, Islam cannot let go of its primary motivating force: the religious dread and awe of needing victims -- yes, human victims. Girard calls this essential element of conventional religion, anthropologically speaking, the "single victim mechanism" (Robert Hamerton-Kelly calls it the "Generative Mimetic Scapegoating Mechanism," and with good reason, but I won't get into all that now).

Needless to say, if the duck walks and talks and looks like a practitioner of human sacrifice, it is a form of quacking paganism. Period. Judaism long ago had to be pulled out of it -- ask the Major and Minor Prophets. Christianity has always ruefully dabbled in it, enjoying a good Sunday afternoon hangin' on the town square. But both listen to a biblical Spirit that says an unequivocal "NO!" to it as a raison d'etre.

There is too much gathering evidence that Islam is far, far away from such an unequivocal message. Especially when Mum and Dad want to take the daughter out back and slit her throat unless stopped by the authorities.

Islamophobia? you might say so...

Janet Levy on Lee Harris (ht: Dag):

The principle of honor is of primary importance in radical Islamic cultures. The honor of the community must be protected at all costs and far exceeds any notion of the individual or of individual rights. Religious leaders, who view the world across a long-term time horizon, operate for the good of the ummah, the propagation of Islam over time and the enforcement of Islamic law.

Tribal success hinges on the inculcation of a uniform system of steadfast shared values and of a sense of shame so deep and visceral that it is impervious to reason and makes death preferable to tribal code violations and the accompanying loss of collective honor. It solidifies a rigidly imposed “us vs. them” mindset in which “the other” is a cursed object of abject enmity. The faithful are indoctrinated and prepared to sacrifice themselves for furthering fanatic tribal goals. Martyrs for the cause are celebrated and elevated to a position of honor.

Tribal cultures thrive on the vacuum that chaos presents. It is a boon to fanaticism and totalitarian control. In a state of chaos, all behaviors become permissible and extreme measures are easy to enforce on desperate populations.

Against such beliefs and behaviors, the enlightened societies of the West are ill equipped to do battle, Harris says. In Western societies, like America, elites serve as critics of the status quo and are often opposed by the populace. They keep any impulses toward fanaticism by the masses in check. Chaos is anathema to reason or order, which must be maintained at all costs. Indeed, the fear of anarchy often leads to appeasement and repudiation of beliefs.

Harris defines America today as a “carpe diem feel good” society in which the happiness of the individual is placed above responsibility to the community, world or future. Rights are cherished above duties, the present valued more than the future, and material acquisitions deemed more important than hard work.

Shaming is used as an effective tool in the enlightened West but with a different twist from that of the Islamic world. People are shamed into thinking the “right” thoughts and ostracized for intolerance and aggressive behavior. This serves to dilute cultural values and life-preserving warrior behavior necessary for survival. In America, people are generally unwilling to make the ultimate sacrifice and will do anything to avoid death and loss of property. The society operates under the notion that all differences can be resolved with negotiation rather than bloodshed. Potential warriors, such as alpha males are feminized, drugged and shamed out of existence. Essentially, mandatory multiculturalism enforces respect for other cultures and disrespect for American culture, Harris argues.

Harris further suggests that America’s Protestant tradition of independent thought and action has been replaced by programmed thought, further weakening our ability to deal with fundamentalist Islamic societies. America’s teachers are “salesmen of a particular ideological brand” and enforce a groupthink mentality of the “correct” opinions. For example, instead of critically evaluating multiple points of view about women in society, students are told that women are oppressed and that they must be purged of their anti-feminist views. Politically correct values and attitudes religiously demand tolerance for different points of view. It is deemed contemptible to view our American culture, our nation or any religion as superior and practically de rigueur to be tolerant of the intolerant and odious, such as Muslim fundamentalists and 9/11 conspiracy theorists. Thus, Western civilization is stripped of the notion that anything precious and worth protecting or fighting for exists.

In summary, the West is suffering from an insidious ideological assault from the outside by fundamentalist Islam that could result in profound societal damage, while at the same time we are, from the inside, undermining our core values and traditions. We are not experiencing a clash of civilizations, but an overt attempt to dismantle the worldwide status quo. The West is vulnerable, because it has failed to recognize that survival hinges on being intolerant to the intolerant and acknowledging the superiority of our way of life and the exceptionalism of America. We will probably be unable to change the Islamists and alter their three-pronged prescription for non-Muslims – death, subjugation or conversion – but we can prevent them from changing us. Through our “enlightened” democracy and lack of cultural protectionism, we are inadvertently aiding their cause. Our ability to fight has been severely weakened by the enlightened principles of tolerance and multiculturalism that we have grown to cherish and by a lack of group cohesiveness and respect for our common values and accomplishments. While we think short-term and teach our children to have contempt for our culture, the Islamists think long-term and teach their children to die for Islam.

According to Harris, our success in fighting the threat of radical Islam will depend on a willingness to defend ourselves against that most potent weapon for survival: fanaticism. Societies that are the most fanatical about their preservation will prevail. America’s best hope is that the struggle for our survival may cause us to awaken and recognize the nobility of our culture as something worth fighting for. We must return to our core traditions and values, take pride in our ethical superiority and exceptionalism and recognize a sacred duty to instill Western ethos in future generations and as widely throughout the world as possible.

Covenant Zone exists to remember the superiority of our Western way of life and to help us become better able to articulate and defend our stake in the covenant of Canadian nationhood.

Theodore Dalrymple:

The new atheists are quite right to see the threat of theocracy in Islamism. But in attacking all religion, they are like the French government which banned not only the wearing of the headscarf in schools, but the wearing of all religious insignia whatsoever, despite the fact that wearing a Star of David or a crucifix has and had a completely different social signification from wearing a headscarf. In the name of non-discrimination, the French government failed to discriminate properly: and proper discrimination is, or ought to be, practically the whole business of life. If there were large numbers of Christians or Jews who were in favour of establishing a theocracy in France, who had a recent record of terrorism, and who terrorised each other into the wearing of crucifixes and Stars of David, then the banning of those insignia would have been justified too. The wearing of the headscarf should be permitted again when Islam has become merely one personal confession among others, without the political significance that it has now.

In attacking all religion so indiscriminately, the atheist authors are, I am sure inadvertently and unintentionally, strengthening the hand of the Islamists. In arguing, for example, that for parents to bring up a child in any religious tradition, even the mildest of Anglicanism, is to abuse a child, with the natural corollary that the law should forbid it (for how can the law permit child abuse?), some of the authors are giving ammunition to the Islamists, who will be able with justice to say to their fellow-religionists, See, it is all or nothing. If you give the secularists an inch, they will take a mile. No compromise with secularism is possible, therefore; cleave unto us.

Islamism is a worthy target, of course, but by now one that has been pretty well aimed at (though I recommend very strongly the forthcoming book from Encounter Books, Brother Tariq: The Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan, by Caroline Fourest). To suggest, however, that all forms of religion are equal, that they are all murderous and dangerous, is not to serve the cause of freedom and tolerance. It is to play into the hands of the very people we should most detest; it is to hand them the rhetorical tools with which they can tell the gullible that our freedoms are not genuine and that our tolerance is a masquerade. It is to do what I should previously have thought was impossible, namely in this respect to put them in the right.

See also: the fate of street girls in Cairo

Casting out "evil"

Covenant Zone, having recently been the target of apotropaic gestures (e.g. we're apparently a "sh*t hole") from a certain lefty site that will go unnamed, I want to link today to Lee Harris' new essay at Tech Central Station that shows us what an apotropaic gesture is. Discussing the recent incident in Pakistan where Islamic fundamentalists took over the Red Mosque, and vowed to fight the government to the death, Harris asks why the Western media comes up with all kinds of euphemisms for describing the fanatics in the Red Mosque.

In Islam, fanatical zeal has been looked upon as both the ethical and theological virtue par excellence. Furthermore, it has been the agent by which the religion of Muhammad came to dominate the hearts and minds of so much of the world. Fanatical zeal is not a pathology of Islam; it is the glue that has held it together. It was the agent that created the original community of the faithful, all of whom had first to reject the tribal identities they were born and raised with, in order to accept their radically new identity as followers of the Prophet—a profound psychological transformation that could only be brought up by fanatical commitment to their new way of life.

The same commitment also explains the amazing success with which Islam was spread in the first hundred years of its existence. Indeed, without grasping the vital role that fanaticism has historically played in Islam, neither its successful birth nor its far more spectacular spread would make sense. The religion of the Prophet was not a religion for the lukewarm, the skeptical, the wishy-washy, the moderate, or the reasonable. If it had been, we would never have heard of it, because it would have been almost immediately absorbed back into the tribal milieu that had long dominated every aspect of life in the Arab peninsula.

The same spirit of fanaticism is at the heart of the battle over the Red Mosque. Yet, despite its absolute centrality to the drama, we in the West are largely reluctant even to speak of it as a factor. Reuters and the AP can bring themselves to refer to Ghazi and his "supporters" as "militants," but they go to considerable pains to avoid calling them by the name that alone truly fits them.

For many, there is a simple explanation of this omission. Reuters and AP are trying to be politically correct. But how convincing is this explanation? Why is it that a word like "fanatic" is treated as being politically incorrect in the first place? If fanatics are proud of their fanaticism, if it is their boast and their glory, then why not call them by the proper term?

In my new book, The Suicide of Reason, I offer an explanation of why so many are reluctant to use the word fanatic to denote those, like Ghazi and his "supporters," are behaving precisely in the same way that all fanatics have behaved through history. "The problem with much of the Western response to Islamic fanaticism," I write, "is that our refusal to use the word fanaticism appears to be based on our reluctance to recognize the fact of fanaticism. We avoid the word in order to avoid having to think about the thing, thereby leaving the impression that our resistance to acknowledging fanaticism arises less from our sensitivity to Muslim feelings than from our wish to evade the momentous challenged posed by fanaticism itself."

When we use words like supporter in place of follower, and militant in place of fanatic, we are engaging in verbal apotropaism—a rare, but helpful word that is defined as "the performance of magic ritual or incantatory formulas to avert evil." When people who really believe in the Devil call him by an affectionate term like Old Nick, they are using an apotropaic device. Instead of running the risk of calling the Devil by his right name, and having him suddenly appear with horns and tail, they refer to him by a less threatening title, one that sounds positively endearing. In short, human beings have always used apotropaic rituals and formulas to ward off that which we fear the most; and we in the West are still doing it today.

In The Suicide of Reason I write that in the contemporary West fanatics like Abdul Rashid like Ghazi and his followers have become "incomprehensibly alien to us. They do not conform to our expectation of normal human behavior; indeed, they shatter all such expectations. They fill us with panic and anxiety....To relieve this panic and anxiety we must either ignore them or else force them to fit into a category of human action with which we do feel comfortable—all in an effort to make their uncanniness less threatening to our comfortable vision of the world." Both Reuters and the AP exhibit the second reaction to the fanatic: by using words like supporter and militant both are attempting to make the incomprehensibly alien something that we think we are familiar with. After all, aren't we supporters of one candidate or other. Aren't there many things that we act militantly about? We have causes, too, for which we are prepared to fight: rights for blacks, or women, or gays. So where is the big difference between us? What is there so special about the behavior of Ghazi and his supporters that we should find it inexplicable, much less threatening?

Because we insist on denying what is most obvious and most essential about fanatics, namely, their fanaticism, we blind ourselves to the radical threat they pose to any established and settled order. For example, Pakistan under General Musharraf falls far short of our Western notions of a free and open society, but few in the West would be happy to see his regime replaced with a new Taliban—and one armed with nuclear weapons. Few in the West would be willing to see Pakistan plunged into civil war and/or anarchy. Yet the same cannot be said of the Pakistanis themselves. Abdul Ghazi, his followers, and those who sympathize with his cause throughout Pakistan would no doubt like to impose a Taliban-like government for their nation, as their record makes clear.
[...]
the ultimate outcome of the train of events set off this last week at the Red Mosque is still unknown, though we in the West are perfectly aware that if the spark turns into a conflagration there will be virtually nothing we can do to stop. Again, we can only stand by, and watch. Yet, if we are prepared to take a serious and unflinching look at the challenge posed to us by Islamic fanaticism, then at least we will be able to watch with vigilance and intelligence, and not fall prey to the illusion that we have solutions to a threat that we in the West have as yet barely began to understand.

If there is one thing a Covenant Zone exists to do, it is to see reality clearly, to avoid our need to engage in rituals of casting out evil, without bothering to understand what evil, in all its tortured humanity, is. Only then can a people hope to get the upper hand on the forces of evil through a self-sacrificing love for humanity and our (e.g. national) covenants. Of course, many on the left today will not even recognize the anthropological legitimacy of the term "evil". So they will not be too busy covenanting.

I wanted to link today to a blog post I read yesterday in which was discussed the phenomenon of "Muslim Background Believers"; it was at this url which has presently gone under password protection: http://blog.siena.org/2007/07/wider-window-on-world.html . An "MBB" is someone of Muslim background who has converted to Christianity. Apparently, while unheard of a couple of decades ago, there are now unknown thousands of them in Saudi Arabia, living in a secret culture, in fear for their lives, but nonetheless living a covenant with the help of a few missionary outsiders. Covenants, where we guarantee ourselves, e.g., to support those freedom lovers under the thumb of tyranny, are a way of bringing a new reality into being. And since I have criticized Christians in the past for turning a blind eye to what happens to their co-religionists in Muslim countries, I wanted to link to a Christian who isn't, who has gone for many years now right into one of the most oppressive societies to keep faith with those who desire freedom through Christ.

Given that this blog has apparently stirred up resentments and apotropaic gestures at another, more popular blog here in Vancouver, I cannot guarantee that our meeting tonight, as every Thursday, 7-9pm in the atrium of the Vancouver Public Library, in front of Blenz Coffee, will go off without incident. Covenant Zone is committed to free and rational conversation in the name of constructing a new, more open, reality than the one in which many of our co-citizens presently live. We will defend this commitment as best we can so that all who are interested in free and open conversation, without threats, scapegoats, or ritualistic castings out of misrepresented evil, will feel at home in the Covenant Zone.