EUROPE ISN'T WESTERN

Why radical Islam might defeat the West (Spengler, 7/07/03, Asia Times)

"Does Spengler know, for instance, that in the last century 2,000 distinct ethnic groups have gone extinct?" Eric Garrett asks in his June 12 riposte, A question of identity, to an earlier article of mine, Neo-cons in a religious bind.

Garrett's organization, the World Conservation Union, is devoted to preserving fragile cultures. As a matter of fact, I reported in this space that in the next decade, yet another 2,000 distinct ethnic groups would go extinct (Live and Let Die of April 13, 2002). Ignore the endangered Ewoks for a moment, Mr Garrett, and explain why the imperial peoples of the past two centuries - Germans, Japanese, French, Italians, Russians, and so forth - have elected to disappear, through failure to reproduce (Why Europe chooses extinction, April 8). [...]

Which brings us to the threat of radical Islam. "You are decadent and hedonistic. We on the other hand are willing to die for what we believe, and we are a billion strong. You cannot kill all of us, so you will have to accede to what we demand." That, in a nutshell, constitutes the Islamist challenge to the West.

Neither the demographic shift toward Muslim immigrants nor meretricious self-interest explains Western Europe's appeasement of Islam, but rather the terrifying logic of the numbers. That is why President Bush has thrown his prestige behind the rickety prospect of an Israeli-Palestinian peace. And that is why Islamism has only lost a battle in Iraq, but well might win the war.

Not a single Western strategist has proposed an ideological response to the religious challenge of Islam. On the contrary: the Vatican, the
guardian-of-last-resort of the Western heritage, has placed itself squarely in the camp of appeasement. Except for a few born-again Christians in the United States, no Western voice is raised in criticism of Islam itself. The trouble is that Islam believes in its divine mission, while the United States has only a fuzzy recollection of what it once believed, and therefore has neither the aptitude nor the inclination for ideological warfare. [...]

Grim men of faith - Loyola, Oldebarnevelt, Richilieu, Mazarin - led the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, while the Florentines amused the tourists (The sacred heart of darkness, February 11). The trouble with Strauss, I reiterate, is that he was an atheist, rather a disadvantage in a religious war. The West has no armed prophet. It doesn't even have an armed theologian.

All of which makes today's quote of the day especially topical:

The words "future of Christianity" are no casual combination of words like the future of motoring, or the future of Europe. Christianity is the founder and trustee of the future.
-Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (1888-1973)

As Jeffrey Hart recalls of his fellow Dartmouth professor, in his terrific book, Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe:

[Mr. Rosenstock-Huessy] had two phrases he repeated so often they remained in a student's mind.

He would say, "History must be told." He explained in various ways that history is to a civilization what personal memory is to an individual an essential part of identity and a source of meaning.

He also said that the goal of education is the citizen. He defined the citizen in a radical and original way arising out of his own twentieth-century experience. He said that a citizen is a person who, if need be, can re-create his civilization.

Spengler is too late, a post-Christian Europe--which has forgotten where it came from--is no longer identifiable as Western Civilization. Islam will certainly come to dominate the European continent--the question is can America reform Islam to make it Western; piece together a new West from a rapidly Christianizing Africa, Asia, and Latin America; or will we be a lonely Western island in an otherwise forsaken world. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 7, 2003 12:19 PM