Two Faces?

Or Two Sides of the Same Coin?

On the heels of Harry Binswanger's most recent column (on "The Battle of Our Era"), where he links theocratic and leftist attacks on Western civilization to one fundamental cause -- rejection of reason -- I find a perfect example at Arts and Letters Daily.

Recall how Binswanger outlines the way that the "secular" left paves the way for religion.

All the anti-reason movements have been unleashed by the Ahmadinejad-look-alike professors in our universities. The intellectual establishment has long attacked reason and science.

They have preached that reason has been refuted, that logic is an arbitrary game, that observation is inherently biased ("theory-laden"), that our thoughts are not objective but slanted products molded by genes, gender, language, or society.

When the celebrities of the campus are open irrationalists like Skinner, Chomsky, Kuhn, Derrida, and Fish, the bulwarks against fanaticism are down. None of our intellectual or political leaders will say, for instance, that Islam is irrational or that religion itself is irrational. Or that environmentalism is just another religion. Thus, the lurking Unabombers and bin Ladens meet no intellectual opposition; they are even encouraged.

How would our intellectuals even be able to damn religion as irrational, when they think that man is "Beyond Freedom and Dignity" (Skinner), that he is fed by innate ideas (Chomsky), that science is subjective (Kuhn), that one is incapable of rationally reading or writing a book (Derrida), or that epistemology is relative to a "community" (Fish). What reigns today is not so superficial a thing as multiculturalism, it is epistemological egalitarianism: every idea is as rational or irrational as every other.

And when this is what the "educated" are given as an "alternative" to their superstitious, tribal culture -- and thus bring it back to the Arab world -- is it any wonder they behave like this?

The Lebanese poet and journalist Abbas Beydoun is a cultural correspondent for the Lebanese daily as-Safir. He is also a frequent guest commentator for a number of German newspapers. Interestingly enough, those of his articles which appear in German differ markedly from his pieces in Arabic. In Der Tagespiegel of July 26, 2006 and in Die Zeit of July 27, for example, he criticised Hizbullah's solo attack and confrontation with Israel, going so far as to describe it as a military putsch. He also emphasised that the majority of Lebanese want peaceful development in their country. But in the edition of as-Safir dated July 28, we find him writing, in cliche-ridden rhetoric, about Hizbullah's great deeds, which, he stated, had generated respect even among the party's sceptics and critics: "Regardless of the former Arab position, Hizbullah has erased a guilt, and corrected the world's memory, in order to compensate for Arab frustration and expunge a sense of shame." [markups edited, my bold]

With teachers like the modern leftists, the only surprise here is that Beydoun even bothered pretending to take sides with the West at all. Perhaps that can be explained by the fact that he still understands the value of deception from the way they fight wars in that part of the world. The left is not only stoking their hostility to the West: Its blatant cynicism and its abject intellectual bankruptcy convince such scoundrels that the West, towering oak that it is, is hollow and will fall in time.

Read the whole thing, especially if you were under the illusion that there was such a thing as a "secular intelligentia" in the Arab world. But even if you are not under such an illusion, it will remain eye-opening.

-- CAV