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I have
sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny
over the mind of man.
Thomas
Jefferson
The ongoing violence in the Middle
East, apparently triggered by a ridiculous, uncivilized, low-budget video
trailer that demeans Islam and its Prophet, Mohammed, is cause for reflection.
WHY is the release of such an amateurish hit-job video cause for anything more
than derision and disgust? Why the rage, the violence, the deep anger directed
at the U.S.?
Proximate causes certainly include
the long term support we've given to dictators across the Moslem world, the ongoing
"War on Terror", and the sanctimonious hubris of a West that preaches the
virtues of freedom, democracy, civil society etc. while clearly supporting tyrannies
in Moslem nations--Dictators R US,
basically.
However, I believe that the
problem runs much deeper than this. At its core, we have a clash between two
fundamental value systems. For the West, with its Enlightenment legacy, our
core values (even if not often truly honored in our own societies) include freedom
of speech--that is, the freedom to say whatever one chooses. The centrality of
such a value entails the impossibility of any blasphemy statute. After all, in
the US for example, there is no state religion per our Constitution's Establishment Clause :
Congress shall make no law
respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise
thereof;
Therefore, religion and religious figures
can be legally mocked and satirized. It's part of free speech.
However, in Islamic lands, the
core value of society is Islam itself. To challenge this idea is to challenge
the very foundations of the social order. Such a challenge is therefore, existential
in nature: By the deep logic of Islamism, this kind of challenge MUST be
smashed, else the very foundations of social order will be imperiled. Free
speech, if permitted, CANNOT encompass the freedom to question religious dogma,
much less to mock the religion of Islam and its founding Prophet.
Therefore, looked at form this
perspective, the current violence triggered by the campy video, represents a
clash of two intrinsically incompatible civilizational worldviews. The rage is directed
primarily at the United States because the United States is where the video was
ALLOWED to be made. That America, and the West in general, does not respect their
deep values is sufficient to set them off. Our perceived insensitivity then
triggers all of the other resentments which they hold towards us.
However, it raises the point as to
what our responsibility is toward this other society. Here, I argue that, aside
from being polite in restating our absolute commitment to freedom of
expression, we have no responsibility whatsoever to accommodate ourselves to their
values system. This is because what is at issue is NOT a clash of
civilizations as neocon theorists such as Samuel Huntington believe. Further,
Islam, as currently interpreted, is NOT an equally valid ordering of
reality to Western rationalism.
I firmly believe in the idea of
progress, by which I mean that the long course of human history can best be
described as a fitful movement AWAY from ignorance and superstition, towards
ever more accurate understanding of reality. It is a move from magical
thinking, as decreed by unchallengeable priests, towards rational thinking by empowered
individuals. It is a growth from infancy into at least the adolescence of our
species. Therefore, religious magical thinking as the basis of societal
organization is childish. Our civilizational paradigm, while in my opinion, still
at an adolescent stage, is more grown-up than is theirs as theirs is predicated
upon this type of magical thinking.
However, this does NOT represent a
fundamental civilizational difference between us and them. We of the west are
NOT inherently better than they are.
Let us not forget that Western
society languished in a religiously-based Dark Age for centuries, while Islam
enjoyed a Golden Age
back in the eighth and ninth centuries. The bright light of Islamic civilization
then illuminated the world. Brilliant achievements in art, science, philosophy,
humanism, technology, and more flooded out of the Abbasid Caliphate. Religion
was studied rationally and analytically. To have lived in the Baghdad of Caliph
Harun al-Rashid was to have lived during an intellectual golden age which not
only rivaled that of Periclean Athens ,
but which almost certainly outshone it.
It was the knowledge developed,
maintained, and spread by Islam that ignited our Western Renaissance, and
ultimately, our European Enlightenment. The West owes Islam for that gift.
Islamic societies have no need
whatsoever to merely imitate the West. They have no need to assimilate our Enlightenment. All that they need to
is to revitalize the smoldering embers of their own Golden Age. That age was characterized
by tolerance rather than some idealized version of absolute conformity to rules
of Islamic religiosity. It was great, not because
of religion, but rather, because it was a self-confident civilization which
could and did behold objective reality in an objective manner. The new religion
provided the organizational framework for an inter-continental civilization,
most of whose members were not even Moslems to emerge
and enlighten the entire world.
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