http://www.newcriterion.com/archives/24/01/after-the-suicide/
After the suicide of the West
By Roger Kimball
"It looks as if Islam had a bigger hand in the thing than we thought…
.. Islam is a fighting creed, and the mullah still stands in the pulpit
with the Koran in one hand and a drawn sword in the other."
-Richard Hannay in John Buchan’s Greenmantle
Suicide is probably more frequent than murder as the end phase of a
civilization.
-James Burnham, Suicide of the West
It seemed fitting that a symposium devoted to the subject of "Threats
to Democracy" should convene on the anniversary of the Battle of
Trafalgar. Not only was it one of the greatest sea battles in history,
but it was also a battle greatly pertinent to the questions that
guided our deliberations: What is the nature of the threats to
democracy, to the culture and civilization of the West, and how can we
best respond to those threats?
Let me say at the outset that I believe that Lord Nelson had the right
idea-sail boldly in among your enemy’s ships, start firing, and don’t
stop until you’ve reduced them to a shambles. It was good for England
and for the rest of Europe that the Duke of Wellington proved himself
to be of like mind a few years later. "Hard pounding, gentlemen," he
said at Waterloo. "We’ll see who pounds longest."
Today, I believe, there is a widely shared understanding that our
culture-not just the political system of democracy but our entire
western way of life-is at a crossroads. That perception is not always
on the surface. Absent the unignorable importunity of attack,
absorption in the tasks of everyday life tends to blunt the perception
of the threats facing us. But we all know that the future of the West,
seemingly so assured even a decade ago, is suddenly negotiable in the
most fundamental way. The essays that follow highlight some of the
principle features of those negotiations. In this introduction, I want
simply to review some of the moral terrain over which we are
traveling.
I believe that Irving Kristol got it right when, in the early 1990s,
he responded to the euphoria and naïveté that greeted the fall of the
Soviet Union. Many commentators announced the imminent arrival of a
new era of peace, brotherhood, international comity, and
enlightenment. Kristol was not so sanguine. In an essay called "My
Cold War," he wrote that
There is no "after the Cold War" for me. So far from having ended, my
cold war has increased in intensity, as sector after sector of
American life has been ruthlessly corrupted by the liberal ethos. It
is an ethos that aims simultaneously at political and social
collectivism on the one hand, and moral anarchy on the other. It
cannot win, but it can make us all losers.
The oft-noted linguistic irony about the "liberal ethos" that Kristol
fears is that it has very little to do with genuine liberty and
everything to do with the servitude of statist ideology.
That ideology comes in a range of flavors and a wide variety of
wrappings. But the essential issue is one that Tocqueville, in
Democracy in America, anatomized as "democratic despotism" and that
Friedrich Hayek, harkening back explicitly to Tocqueville, laid out
with clinical brilliance in The Road to Serfdom. Quoting Tocqueville
on the "enervating" effect of paternalistic democracy, Hayek notes
that "the most important change which extensive government control
produces is a psychological change, an alteration in the character of
a people."
One of the most penetrating meditations on the nature of that
alteration is James Burnham’s book Suicide of the West. Written in
1964, that book, like its author, is largely and unfairly forgotten
today. Burnham’s was a first-rate political intelligence, and Suicide
of the West is one of his most accomplished pieces of polemic. "The
primary issue before Western civilization today, and before its member
nations, is survival." Suicide of the West is very much a product of
the Cold War. Many of the examples are dated. But as with Irving
Kristol’s Cold War, so with Burnham’s. The field of battle may have
changed; the armies have adopted new tactics; but the war isn’t over:
it is merely transmogrified. In the subtitle to his book, Burnham
promises "the definitive analysis of the pathology of liberalism." At
the center of that pathology is an awful failure of understanding
which is also a failure of nerve, a failure of "the will to survive."
Liberalism, Burnham concludes, is "an ideology of suicide." He admits
that such a description may sound hyperbolic. "‘Suicide,’ it is
objected, is too emotive a term, too negative and ‘bad.’" But it is
part of the pathology that Burnham describes that such objections are
"most often made most hotly by Westerners who hate their own
civilization, readily excuse or even praise blows struck against it,
and themselves lend a willing hand, frequently enough, to pulling it
down."
By way of illustration, let me return for a moment to Lord Nelson and
Trafalgar. For anyone concerned with the fate of our culture, our
civilization, the anniversary of Trafalgar was full of lessons. I
wonder, for example, what Nelson would have thought of the Royal
Navy’s decision last summer to reenact the battle not as a conflict
between the English on one side and the French and the Spanish on the
other but, out of sensitivity to the feelings of the French, as a
contest between a Red Team and a Blue Team. Today, I suppose, Nelson,
instead of broadcasting his famous message about duty, would have had
to hoist the signal that "England Expects or at Least Suggests That
Every Person No Matter What Gender, Race, Class, Sexual Orientation,
or National Origin Will Be Politically Correct." Hard work on the flag
officer, of course, but preserving the emotion of virtue is not
without cost.
Trafalgar is full of lessons. When my wife and I visited London last
September, we took our young son, a fervent admirer of Nelson, to
Trafalgar Square to see Nelson’s column. We were surprised to see that
it had company. On one of the plinths behind the famous memorial sat a
huge sculpture of white marble. This, I knew, was one of the
benefactions that Ken Livingstone, the Communist mayor of London, had
bestowed on his grateful constituency: public art on Trafalgar Square
that was more in keeping with cool Britannia’s new image than statues
of warriors. From a distance, the white blob looked liked a gigantic
marshmallow in need of an air pump. But on closer inspection, it
turned out to be a sculpture of an armless and mostly legless woman,
with swollen breasts and distended belly. In fact, it was a sculpture
by Marc Quinn of one Alison Lapper, made when she was eight months
pregnant. Ms. Lapper, who was born with those horrible handicaps, is
herself an artist. Asked how she felt about the sculpture, Ms. Lapper
said that she was glad that at last Trafalgar Square recognized
someone who was not a white male murderer. It is worth noting, as one
journalist pointed out, that the architects of Trafalgar Square were
ahead of their time in at least one sense, for the sculpture of Ms.
Lapper represented the second commemoration of a seriously disabled
person. After all, there is Nelson on his column, missing his right
arm and an eye.
How England chose to commemorate the Battle of Trafalgar and to
respect its most public acknowledgment of Lord Nelson’s service to his
country should give us pause. The union of sentimentality, political
correctness, and multicultural piety is a disturbing ambassador to the
future. It is a perfect example-one of many-of the "liberal ethos"
whose progress Irving Kristol mournfully observed and whose essential
character Burnham delineated.
What are the stakes? The terrorist attacks of 9/11 gave us a vivid
reminder-but one, alas, that seems to have faded from the attention of
many Western commentators who seem more concerned about recreational
facilities at Guantanamo Bay than the future of their towns and
cities. For myself, ever since 9/11, when I think about threats to
democracy, I recall a statement by one Hussein Massawi, a former
Hezbollah leader, which I believe I first read in one of Mark Steyn’s
columns. "We are not fighting," Mr. Massawi said, "so that you will
offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you."
It is worth pausing to reflect on that statement. The thing I admire
most about it is its pristine clarity. You know where you are with Mr.
Massawi. It requires no special hermeneutic ingenuity to construe his
meaning. And you also know that he wasn’t speaking idly. He was a man
of his word, as the events of 9/11 and the names Bali, Madrid,
and-just last summer-London remind us.
Or so one would have thought. Mr. Massawi speaks clearly, but who is
listening? Our colleges and universities have been preaching the creed
of multiculturalism for the last few decades. Politicians, pundits,
and the so-called cultural elite have assiduously absorbed the
catechism, which they accept less as an argument about the way the
world should be as an affirmation of the essential virtue of their own
feelings. We are now beginning to reap the fruit of that liberal
experiment with multiculturalism. The chief existential symptom is
moral paralysis, expressed, for example, in the inability to
discriminate effectively between good and evil. The New York Times
runs full-page advertisements, signed by all manner of eminent
personages, that compare President Bush to Adolf Hitler. Meanwhile,
the pop singer Michael Jackson spends an unspecified number of
millions to finance the construction of a mosque in Bahrain
"designated for learning the principles and teachings of Islam."
Thanks, Michael.
Over the years, The New Criterion has commented often on "the culture
wars," the vast smorgasbord of intellectual, political, and moral
havoc bequeathed to us by the 1960s. What we see now is a darker face
of those conflicts. On the one hand, you have people like Mr. Massawi,
and their name is legion. If American Airlines will lend them a 767,
they will happily plow it into the most convenient skyscraper. Should
they somehow get hold of a vial of anthrax or smallpox or an atomic
weapon, we can be sure they would have not the least hesitation about
obliterating whatever seat of Western decadence was most ready to
hand-an American target would be best, of course, but failing that
almost any other city would do. So far, Mr. Massawi and his pals have
had to do without atomic or biological weapons, but they have kept
themselves busy with semtex, car bombs, and the occasional televised
beheading.
All this violence is not aimless. It has a clear goal, not only to
push the West out of Saudia Arabia and other parts of the Middle East
but also to establish the rule of Sharia, of Islamic law, wherever
Muslims in any number have congregated. This is the condition that the
Egyptian historian Bat Ye’or has called dhimmitude: the state of the
dhimmis, the "protected" or "guilty" non-Muslim people in a Muslim
world. Dhimmitude outlines the official status of a conquered,
spiritually cowed people, people, as the Koran puts it, who are
allowed to live unmolested as second-class citizens so long as they
"feel themselves subdued."
I think we know where we are with the Mr. Massawis of the world. But
how do we react? Well, the U.S. and British armed forces act in one
way. Our intellectual and cultural leaders, by and large, act in quite
another. Our reaction-or lack of reaction-is just as much of a threat
as the overt belligerence of Massawi & Co. A few days after 9/11, I
was talking with a friend who teaches at Williams College. The
response on campus there, as on so many campuses across the country,
was shock, dismay, and outrage-partly at what had happened at Ground
Zero, the Pentagon, and that field in Pennsylvania, but even more at
what has come to be called Islamophobia. At Williams, my friend told
me, one distraught colleague insisted that the college air movies
about the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II as a
warning about the Great Backlash Against Muslims that was just about
to sweep the country.
Not just this country, either. This past summer, BBC was preparing a
film version of John Buchan’s great "shocker" Greenmantle, whose plot
turns on supposed German efforts to stir Turkish Muslims to jihad
during the First World War. All was going along swimmingly until July
7, when some real-life British Muslims detonated themselves on the
London transport system. Reaction at the BBC? They canceled the show
for fear of wounding the feelings of Muslims.
While we are waiting for that backlash, and humming "Let’s Not Be
Beastly to the Muslims," it is worth noting the word "Islamophobia" is
a misnomer. A phobia describes an irrational fear, and it is axiomatic
that fearing the effects of radical Islam is not irrational, but on
the contrary very well-founded indeed, so that if you want to speak of
a legitimate phobia-it’s a phobia I experience frequently-we should
speak instead of Islamophobia-phobia, the fear of and revulsion
towards Islamophobia.
Now that fear is very well founded, and it extends into the nooks and
crannies of daily life. A couple of months ago, for example, I read in
a London paper that "Workers in the benefits department at Dudley
Council, West Midlands, were told to remove or cover up all
pig-related items, including toys, porcelain figures, calendars and
even a tissue box featuring Winnie the Pooh and Piglet" because the
presence of images of our porcine friends offended Muslims. A
councillor called Mahbubur Rahman told the paper that he backed the
ban because it represented "tolerance of people’s beliefs." In other
words, Piglet really did meet a Heffalump, and it turns out he was
wearing a kaffiyeh.
The observation-often, though apparently inaccurately, attributed to
George Orwell-that the triumph of evil requires only that good men
stand by and do nothing has special relevance at a time, like now,
that is inflected by terrorism. I have several friends-thoughtful,
well-intentioned people-who believe the United States should never
have intervened in Afghanistan, who believe even more staunchly that
the United States should never have intervened in Iraq, and, moreover,
that we should get out forthwith. "We should," they believe, "keep to
ourselves. We have no business meddling with the rest of the world. We
cannot be the world’s constabulary, nor should we aspire to be. It is
not in our interest-for it breeds resentment-and it is not in the
interest of those we profess to help, since they should be allowed to
govern themselves-or not, as the case may be."
Whatever the wisdom of the position in the abstract (and I have my
doubts about it), the resurgence of international terrorism, fueled by
hate and devoted to death, renders it otiose. Last summer’s bombings
in London were, as these things go, relatively low in casualties. But
they were high in indiscriminateness. The people on those buses and
subway cars were as innocent as innocent can be: just folks, moms and
dads and children on their way to work or school or play, as
uninterested, most of them, in politics or Islam as it is possible to
be. And yet those home-grown Islamicists were happy to blow them to
bits.
Here is the novelty: Our new enemies are not political enemies in any
traditional sense, belligerent in the service of certain interests of
their own. Their belligerence is focused rather on the very existence
of an alternative to their vision of beatitude, namely on Western
democracy and its commitment to individual freedom and economic
prosperity. I return to Hussein Massawi: "We are not fighting so that
you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you."
In fact, the situation is even grimmer than Mr. Massawi suggests. For
our new enemies are not simply bent on our destruction: they are
pleased to compass their own destruction as a collateral benefit. This
is one of those things that makes Islamofascism a particularly toxic
form of totalitarianism. At least most Communists had some rudimentary
attachment to the principle of self-preservation. In the face of such
death-embracing fanaticism our only option is unremitting combat.
The large issue here is one that has bedeviled liberal societies ever
since there were liberal societies: namely, that in attempting to
create the maximally tolerant society, we also give scope to those who
would prefer to create the maximally intolerant society.
In these pages last June, I wrote about the philosopher Leszek
Kolakowski. Let me conclude by returning to what I said there. In an
essay called "The Self-Poisoning of the Open Society," Kolakowski
dilates on this basic antinomy of liberalism. Liberalism implies
openness to other points of view, even (it would seem) those points of
view whose success would destroy liberalism. But tolerance to those
points of view is a prescription for suicide. Intolerance betrays the
fundamental premise of liberalism, i.e., openness. As Robert Frost
once put it, a liberal is someone who refuses to take his own part in
an argument.
Kolakowski is surely right that our liberal, pluralist democracy
depends for its survival not only on the continued existence of its
institutions, but also "on a belief in their value and a widespread
will to defend them." The question is: Do we, as a society, still
enjoy that belief? Do we possess the requisite will? Or was François
Revel right when he said that "Democratic civilization is the first in
history to blame itself because another power is trying to destroy
it"? The jury is still out on those questions. A good test is the
extent to which we can resolve the antinomy of liberalism. And a good
start on that problem is the extent to which we realize that the
antinomy is, in the business of everyday life, illusory.
The "openness" that liberal society rightly cherishes is not a vacuous
openness to all points of view: it is not "value neutral." It need
not, indeed it cannot, say Yes to all comers, to the Islamofascist who
after all has his point of view, just as much as the soccer mom, who
has hers. American democracy, for example, affords its citizens great
latitude, but great latitude is not synonymous with the proposition
that "anything goes." Our society, like every society, is founded on
particular positive values-the rule of law, for example, respect for
the individual, religious freedom, the separation of church and state.
Western democratic society, that is to say, is rooted in what
Kolakowski calls a "vision of the world." Part of that vision is a
commitment to openness, but openness is not the same as indifference.
The problem is that large portions of Western society, especially
those portions entrusted with perpetuating its political and cultural
capital, have lost sight of that vision. In part, I believe, this is a
religious problem-more to the point, it is a problem consequent upon
the failure of religion. In his essay "Targeted Jihad" below, Douglas
Murray summarizes this point well.
It may be no sin-may indeed be one of our society’s most appealing
traits-that we love life. But the scales, as in so many things, have
tipped to an extreme. From seeing so much for which we would live,
people in our society now see fewer and fewer causes for which they
would die. We have passed to a point where prolongation is all. We
have become like the parents of Admetos in Euripides’
Alcestis-"walking cadavers," unwilling to give up the few remaining
days (in Europe’s case, of its peace dividend) even if only by doing
so can any generational future be assured. Even the interventionist
wars of the West only seem possible when we can ensure that our troops
kill but do not die for the cause in hand. wrong.
In fact, I believe that Mr. Murray may overstate the extent to which
we in the West "love life." We love our pleasures, which isn’t quite
the same thing. But his main point, about there being fewer and fewer
things for which we would be willing to risk our lives, is exactly
right. James Burnham made a similar point about facing down the
juggernaut of Communism: "just possibly we shall not have to die in
large numbers to stop them: but we shall certainly have to be willing
to die." The issue, Burnham saw, is that modern liberalism has
equipped us with an ethic too abstract and empty to inspire real
commitment. Modern liberalism, he writes,
does not offer ordinary men compelling motives for personal suffering,
sacrifice, and death. There is no tragic dimension in its picture of
the good life. Men become willing to endure, sacrifice, and die for
God, for family, king, honor, country, from a sense of absolute duty
or an exalted vision of the meaning of history… . And it is precisely
these ideas and institutions that liberalism has criticized, attacked,
and in part overthrown as superstitious, archaic, reactionary, and
irrational. In their place liberalism proposes a set of pale and
bloodless abstractions-pale and bloodless for the very reason that
they have no roots in the past, in deep feeling and in suffering.
Except for mercenaries, saints, and neurotics, no one is willing to
sacrifice and die for progressive education, medicare, humanity in the
abstract, the United Nations, and a ten percent rise in Social
Security payments.
The Islamofascists have a fanatical belief that theirs is a holy
mission, that incinerating infidels is their bounden duty. For them
suicide is a gateway to paradise. For us suicide is just that:
suicide. Although we began by calling this symposium "Threats to
Democracy," it became clear in the course of our proceedings that the
threat was larger, more encompassing than that title suggests. As the
succeeding essays make clear, what we are dealing with is the real
culture war-a war, as Burnham said, "for survival." In "It’s the
demography, stupid," Mark Steyn writes about the West’s survival in
the most elemental sense: much of what could once upon a time have
been called Christian Europe is simply failing to reproduce itself. "A
society that has no children," he notes, "has no future." But the
demographic timebomb, as Douglas Murray, Roger Scruton, and Keith
Windshuttle note, is only part of the story. As Scruton puts it, a
kind of "moral obesity" cripples much of Western culture, "to the
point where ideals and long-term goals induce in them nothing more
than a flummoxed breathlessness."
The question is whether we believe anything with sufficient vigor to
jettison the torpor of our barren self-satisfaction. There are signs
that the answer is Yes, but you won’t see them on CNN or read about
them in The New York Times. The people presiding over such
institutions would rather die than acknowledge that someone like James
Burnham (to say nothing of George W. Bush) was right. It just may come
to that.
Notes
"Threats to Democracy: Then and Now," a symposium organized jointly by
The New Criterion and London’s Social Affairs Unit, took place on
October 21, 2005 at the Union League Club in New York City.
Participants were Max Boot, Robert H. Bork, Michael W. Gleba, Anthony
Glees, Roger Kimball, Herbert I. London, Kenneth Minogue, Michael
Mosbacher, Douglas Murray, James Piereson, Daniel Pipes, Roger
Scruton, Mark Steyn, and Keith Windschuttle. Discussion revolved
largely around earlier versions of the essays printed in this special
section
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"If somebody from al-Qaida is calling you, we'd like to know why."
- President George W. Bush - January 1, 2006
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