YOU SAY YOU WANT A REFORMATION :

How the West was lost : how Pim Fortuyn and others hijacked liberal values and provoked a Muslim backlash against liberalism itself (Melanie Phillips, 5/11/02, The Spectator)

[W]as Fortuyn a martyr to the Right, or to the Left?

The answer is neither. He embodied instead the profound confusions of the West, which have not only torn up the political map but have also hijacked
liberalism itself, turned it inside-out, and delivered it bound and gagged to the far Right. For Western society has embraced both a libertinism and a
cultural nihilism which are not liberal at all; on the contrary, they actually threaten the liberal values of which Western libertines and nihilists so misleadingly claim to be the guardians.

Take the drug use for which the Netherlands has become so famous and which was so enthusiastically promoted by Fortuyn. The Dutch blame immigrants for
the epidemic of drugs and crime. But it is not immigrants that are the cause of the problem; it is rather the indigenous Dutch libertarians, whose misguided permissive approach has resulted in a spiral of social mayhem. This is not a liberal policy. Harm to individuals and society was never part of the liberal agenda. Similarly, sexual licence has left behind a gathering trail of damage and misery in sundered families, broken hearts, and the shredding of trust and security.

Moreover, the very heart of liberalism was the freedom to enter into binding private contracts. Yet the libertine assault on the family has made the marriage contract progressively meaningless, destroying the ability of individuals to secure the future for themselves and their children. As someone who deplores this warping of liberal values, I find that Muslims are often allies. Their critique offers a salutary contrast to Western indifference and inertia. Muslims rightly condemn the collapse of Western moral authority, the failure of nerve that has created our epidemics of crime, drug abuse, family breakdown and promiscuity. They are right to be horrified at the wholesale destruction of the sacred, and the worship instead of consumer choice. They are right to point to the meaninglessness and vacuity of secular society, its arrogance and the paralysis of its institutions.

This is, after all, why so many are turning to fundamentalism in Christianity and Judaism as well as Islam. It represents a search for certainty, authority and hope in a world where the mainstream has connived at their destruction. It provides an anchor in a society which insists on kicking away all the props of traditional attachments. This is surely why Islam, an actively proselytising religion, retains such a strong hold on minorities from Muslim countries. [...]

The further Western society retreats from its core morality, the more it opens the way for Islam to fill the gaps left by Christianity in full flight from its own beliefs. Multiculturalism is predicated on the idea that all faiths are equal; but the fact is that, if enfeebled Christianity no longer identifies itself as the spiritual pastor of the culture it founded, then Islam will move into the vacuum.

[W]e have to reassert liberalism as a moral project which does not pretend to be morally neutral. We have to acknowledge that liberal values are rooted in the Judaeo-Christian tradition and sprang from British culture. We have to defend them by reaffirming the values, history and institutions of Britain using the language of morality, a word which the Left has degraded into an insult and at which much of the Tory party still runs screaming from the room.

No wonder there is such a gap between governed and governments. No wonder Islam holds Western society in such contempt. No wonder the way is open for
populist demagogues and cynical racists of the far Right to foment and exploit such profound confusion and disillusion. Liberalism has to be rescued from the clutches of the libertarians, in order to defend liberal democracy from militant Islam on the one hand and the racist Right on the other. Fortuyn was never going to be the answer. He was part of the problem. But in exposing the hypocrisy and confusion of false liberalism, he did us all a service.

If it has done nothing else, the current clash between Islam and the West has created a consensus, here in the West, that Islam has to undergo a Reformation if the Islamic nations are going to be able to compete with the West economically. But the West has been reluctant to consider whether it too must undergo a Reformation in the political sphere, in order to compete with Islam morally. It behooves us naught to be temporarily wealthy if in the process we destroy our own civilization. Just as Islam has much to learn from the West, so does the West have much to learn from its own traditions : freedom is not a worthwhile end in itself; it is merely a necessary means to achieve a good society. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 13, 2002 8:54 AM