Tell and Show on Leftism

At RealClear Politics, I have encountered an essay by Bruce Thornton called "Absolute Certainty" which tells and shows us exactly how leftism is leading the West away from the values of the Enlightenment and back towards those of the Middle Ages.

Tell and show? Yes. It's normally "show and tell", but here, the chronological order is reversed from that common phrase. The article starts out by making some very good points about now the strategy of the Islamists depends upon the weakness of the West, and specfically due to the influence of leftist nihilism. Here, Thornton is telling us what is wrong. But then something happens. Rather than calling for the West to rally behind such secular values as individual rights, he mysteriously begins chiding the West for not being religious enough. At this point he shows us, unintentionally, what is wrong. To see what I mean, read on.

Thornton starts out strong, pointing out the ugly truth behind Islam. Many people, educated in schools made worse than useless by such leftist fads as progressive education, multiculturalism, and Marxism, simply have not been taught any of this, would be ill-equipped to pass the appropriate judgement on it if they were, and would explain it all away even if they could see it as wrong.

Coming hard upon the heels of the cartoon riots and the election of the Hamas terrorists, the destruction of the Shi'ite mosque of the Golden Dome in Samarra by Sunni jihadists, and the subsequent Shi'ite bloody retaliation, should put to rest Western delusions about the true nature of Islam. But don't hold your breath. Such displays of Islam's violent intolerance have been coming thick and fast the last few decades, and can be found on every page of history going back to the 7th century, when Islam began its expansion with the blood of several hundred decapitated Jews.

Yet still some Westerners, enthralled to their own materialist assumptions and multicultural "we are the world" sentimentalism, wave away this evidence and reduce this destructive behavior to any and every cause except the one that counts: spiritual belief. So we hear that the violence is caused by a lack of jobs, or a lack of liberal-democratic institutions, or "frustration" and insecurity about the dismal backwardness of most Muslim states, or wounded pride in the face of Western success, or resentment of Western imperialist and colonialist sins, or oppressive autocrats, or . . . take your pick. The same therapeutic mentality that thinks destructive behavior in teens results from a "lack of self-esteem" reduces the religious values of Muslims to mere "epiphenomena," as the Marxists see it, symptoms of some underlying condition rooted in material deprivation, political impotence, or psychological trauma.

So far, so good. And the next couple of paragraphs are even better, as they do a pretty good job of explaining the fanatically religious, medieval mindset to the secular Westerner, to whom this is quite alien.

The problem with Islam, however, is not a lack of self-esteem but too damned much. This is a faith fanatically certain of its truth and righteousness, the culminating vision of God's relations with humanity, the ultimate meaning of human existence on every level, including the social and political. As such, its destiny is to spread over the whole world until the benefits, both in this life and the next, of submission to God are bestowed on all humans, and the dysfunctional man-made values -- including democracy, materialism, "equal rights," and freedom -- are swept away. For however alluring, these do not deliver true happiness or true freedom, but mere hedonism and license that create misery and degradation in this world, and put the soul at risk in the next.

If, then, you are in possession of this truth that you are absolutely certain holds the key to universal happiness in this world and the next, why would you be tolerant of alternatives? Why should you tolerate a dangerous lie? Why should you "live and let live," the credo of the spiritually moribund who stand for everything because they stand for nothing? And why wouldn't you kill in the name of this vision, when the infidel nations work against God's will and his beneficent intentions for the human race?

And then Thornton starts going off track. The following paragraph does rightly chide the Westerner for not taking the jihadists seriously, but for the wrong reason. Namely, Thornton does exactly what Dennis Prager does on an almost daily basis: He asserts that secularism and leftism are one and the same.

This is precisely what the jihadists tell us, what fourteen centuries of Islamic theology and jurisprudence tell us, what the Koran and Hadith tell us. Yet we smug Westerners, so certain of our own superior knowledge that human life is really about genes or neuroses or politics or nutrition, condescendingly look down on the true believer. Patronizing him like a child, we tell him that he doesn't know that his own faith has been "hijacked" by "fundamentalists" who manipulate his ignorance, that what he thinks he knows about his faith is a delusion, and that the true explanation is one that we advanced, sophisticated Westerners understand while the believer remains mired in superstition and neurotic fantasy. [bold added]

Here, Thornton cites the various ways leftist intellectuals explain away the actions of the Islamists and conflates it with secularism in general. He even mocks those who might buy these "explanations" as "so certain of our superior knowledge". This is an allusion to the leftist canard that certainty is not possible to man. However, Thornton is not content to simply mock "secularism", he is going to "show" us it is wrong by noting the failures of the West, past and present, which stem from leftist attitudes that have gained common currency in the West. This burial of "secularism" under a mountain of facts culminates in this paragraph.

The true measure of our failure adequately to respect spiritual motives can be taken from the Bush administration's steadfast refusal to put the crisis with Islam in these terms. The materialist left, of course, has been taught by Freud and Marx that religion is an "illusion," so obviously we can't expect them to grasp how powerfully spiritual imperatives can move people. But when a self-proclaimed born-again Christian either can't or won't see the clash of spiritual goods underlying the conflict, then we know how thoroughly the materialists have done their work of marginalizing religion in the West. [bold added]

Since secularism equals failed leftism to Thornton, and leftism (e.g., multiculturalism) has made even the Christians unable to appreciate how strongly the Islamists are motivated by faith, this must mean that we are insufficiently religious enough to understand religion!

I agree with Thornton that the survival of the West will depend taking seriously the power of religion as a motivator, but I completely disagree with him that one must be religious to appreciate that point. What about all that evidence he himself brought up in his first paragraph? What of the atrocities in New York and Pennsylvania in 2001? This atheist takes the murderous desires uttered by Moslems very seriously.

For the sake of argument, let's grant that Thornton does not know of any secular philosophy that holds that certainty is possible to man, and that he really does believe that secularism and leftism are one and the same. Let's assume he was not using leftism as a straw man for secularism. Then his last two paragraphs show us that leftism has paved the way for a resurrection of the medieval mindset in the West.

Perhaps the best example of this contempt for our spiritual foundations came when the President apologized for using the word "Crusade." The demonization of the Crusades is a historical distortion that acquiesces in the jihadist rewriting of history in order to exploit Western self-loathing and spiritual emptiness. Whatever the sordid or brutal motives and actions of the Crusaders, they were still for the most part driven by a spiritual imperative to restore the Holy Land to the Christian civilization that had defined the Middle East for six centuries before being violently transformed by the armies of Allah. For the most aggressively imperialistic culture in the history of the world to whine now about Western imperialism-- and be taken seriously by Westerners -- testifies to the intellectual corruption endemic in the West.

If we continue down this road of appeasement, apology, and blackmail, then our outlook is indeed grim. A culturally weaker and ruder Europe turned back the Islamic tide because it was united by its Christian faith, the spiritual strength of all those before us who died and killed so that this prosperous, free world we enjoy could exist. But what unites the West now, when our credo seems to be that juvenile sentiment from John Lennon's "Imagine": "Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too"? Is this the belief that can resist an enemy who knows with absolute certainty what is worth killing and dying for?

The nihilistic left has indeed gutted the West culturally, leaving many of us with the misconception that certainty is impossible through reason and that there is nothing (like our own lives and freedom) worth fighting for. Into this vacuum, religion is poised to make a comeback, be that through the capitulation of the West to Islam or a return to what Thornton rightly called -- but without a more thorough exploration of what that would entail -- a "weaker and ruder" culture. But he does leave us with a clue when he excuses the brutality of the Crusades as "still for the most part driven by a spiritual imperative to restore the
Holy Land to the Christian civilization." As long as God -- the Christian one -- wills it, it's OK. Thornton seems more sure than he ought to be that if he gets his wish for a more Christian West that those in power will find whatever he says and does in accordance with what they think God's will is....

The only way to prevent our civilization's descent back into a dark ages is for a rational alternative to religion to become more widely known. The secular values of the West, and not religion, are what have made it great. For the West to rally a defense, its people must understand these values, their actual philosophical foundation, and why they are so important before they will realize that these values promote their lives and so are worth fighting for.

-- CAV

Updates

3-2-06: Corrected a typo.