Tectonic plates unhinged?

We are finally paying attention to the explosions unleashed by the hitting of two tectonic plates, which have been hitting each other for centuries: mainly, "the confrontation of a society with a pre-Enlightenment way of thinking with a society with a post-Enlightenment way of thinking." What will be the new landscape once the earthquake and its aftershocks have waned? As Mr. Darlymple suggests,

however much we may criticize the Enlightenment, as being in some respects shallow, or as leading to the destruction of any transcendent meaning to human life, the irreducible fact is that we are all children of the Enlightenment, and when — as now — we see the freedom that the Enlightenment wrought challenged in so intellectually primitive and thuggish a way, we realize for once how very much we owe to the Enlightenment. You don’t really appreciate something until you have lost it, or at least are in danger of losing it; and no philosophical critic of the Enlightenment has ever really wanted to live in a pre-Enlightenment society.

Please read:

Theodore Dalrymple: Unenlightened -
National Review
February 27, 2005

As extremist Muslims react to the Danish cartoons, the Enlightenment doesn’t look so bad, huh?

Where do you get a Danish flag to burn when you live in Damascus or Karachi? I am not sure that I would find it easy to come by one, and I live in France, a fellow member of the European Union. In fact, I don’t think I could even find a French flag to burn in the streets of my nearest town (though I confess that I am not an experienced flag-burner).

Moreover, Damascus is not the kind of place where spontaneous demonstrations happen: A genuine expression of mass popular sentiment there would be a revolution, not a demonstration. Let us also not forget that the Syrian regime is itself secularist and therefore anti-Islamic, at least in theory. Islam is to Assad what Russian Orthodoxy was to Stalin during the Second World War.

Nevertheless, the fury belatedly expressed by the public in the Muslim world after its attention had been maliciously brought to the cartoons first published four months ago in Denmark is as genuine as any ersatz or kitsch emotion ever is. There is a great deal of pleasure, after all, to be had from indignant outrage, especially when there isn’t much else in your life. The polities of Islamic countries tend to ensure that this is true of a large proportion of the population.

The psychology of the Muslim extremists in Europe and the Middle East strongly reminded me of something, though at first I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was. Eventually I realized: They are like the inhabitants of our ghettoes who demand something that they call “respect,” and which they extort by fear for lack of any other means by which to earn it.

The Muslims are not deceived by the pusillanimous apologies of the Danes, or the odious, unctuous, and fatuous expressions of sympathy and understanding for their feelings that have emerged from official circles in Britain and America, in a vain and cowardly attempt to defuse the situation by a precipitate though insincere abandonment of the best values of the Enlightenment. Would Voltaire have caved in so cravenly?

Amman, Jordan, February 2006 Ali Jarekji/Reuters

The Muslim extremists know perfectly well that the West does not respect them, and that the only way they can cut a figure in the world is by terror. Technologically, scientifically, artistically, philosophically, economically they are nullities: but they know how to be vicious, and that makes up for every other defect. If the world will not listen to their tedious religiose lucubrations, it will at least pay heed to their bloodcurdling threats. Each expression of pseudo-understanding is music to their ears: They know that threats of mass decapitation and killing in the streets à la Theo van Gogh have worked. It is an open invitation for more of the same.

The problem is not only for Western democracies, of course, which so far have demonstrated a lack of resolve comparable only to that of Chamberlain and Daladier in the face of Hitler, though without the extenuating circumstances (Chamberlain, at least, had a genuine and humane horror of war). The problem for Muslim countries is even worse.

Whatever the doctrines of Islam, it is a fact that there are countless Muslims who are content to live and let live, and who are by no means religious fanatics. I have traveled fairly widely in the Islamic world, and have met almost everywhere with kindness and hospitality. In some respects, Islamic societies are notably superior to our own: It is — or used to be — safer to walk in a Cairo slum than it now is in the best parts of the West End of London. People behave in a more dignified manner than among us: There is very great poverty in Cairo, for example, but not the willful degradation, at least in public, that you see almost everywhere in the West.

The problem is that Islam seems to allow no way of institutionalizing moderation, beyond Mubarak-style repression. Just as left-wingers used to say that there are no enemies to the left, for fear of losing caste and being branded right-wing, so Muslims, especially those in power, find it difficult to admit to enemies claiming religious purity, for fear of being branded anti-Islamic.

Hence a newspaper editor in Jordan was not only dismissed but imprisoned for daring to write that the Muslim reaction to the cartoons was excessive, and to call on Muslims to be sensible. It seems to me likely that the Jordanian ruling class agreed with this, but dared not do so in public, or even allow it to be thought that it didn’t object very strongly to it. Otherwise it could be presented as being lukewarm in the defense of Islam.

And this in turn is because no Islamic country of which I am aware will allow even closely argued intellectual public criticism of Islam of the kind that Christianity has now had to withstand for hundreds of years. If you can’t criticize Islam publicly, there can be no moderation founded upon anything except force, which is not only susceptible to counterforce, but intellectually and emotionally incoherent. It is surely emblematic of the extremely fragile existential position of Islam that a scholarly book such as Ibn Warraq’s Why I Am Not a Muslim is not widely available in Muslim countries, to put it mildly (unlike The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, for respect is a strictly one-way street in the opinion of many Muslims).

In other words, what we are seeing is the confrontation of a society with a pre-Enlightenment way of thinking with a society with a post-Enlightenment way of thinking. And however much we may criticize the Enlightenment, as being in some respects shallow, or as leading to the destruction of any transcendent meaning to human life, the irreducible fact is that we are all children of the Enlightenment, and when — as now — we see the freedom that the Enlightenment wrought challenged in so intellectually primitive and thuggish a way, we realize for once how very much we owe to the Enlightenment. You don’t really appreciate something until you have lost it, or at least are in danger of losing it; and no philosophical critic of the Enlightenment has ever really wanted to live in a pre-Enlightenment society.

If in Islamic countries free criticism of the religion were allowed without endangering the lives of the people who criticized it, then the Danish cartoons would have been gratuitously offensive and reprehensible, because quite unnecessary, as are all the gimcrack works of art such as Piss Christ that so offend the Christian sensibility. But the fundamental objection to the cartoons was not that they were offensive, but that they were pointed, albeit rather crude, criticism.

The fundamental problem of the Muslim world is that it wants the material fruits or benefits of the Enlightenment without the Enlightenment itself. A considerable proportion of the large migrant population from Islamic countries to Europe has wanted this too, which is why many such migrants are notably less successful in their adopted countries than their Hindu, Sikh, and Chinese counterparts.

Muslims have been trying to square this circle for well over a century, since they first became aware of just how retarded they were by comparison with a civilization that theirs once more than equaled. Like the inhabitants of the ghetto, they want the respect of the rest of the world without wishing to do the things necessary to obtain it. Is it not a deeply humiliating reproach to Muslims that many in the nations where the Danish legations were burned down would love to live in Denmark, if only they were allowed to do so, cartoons of Muhammad or no cartoons of Muhammad?

Mr. Dalrymple is a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author most recently of Our Culture, What’s Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses.