ROUSSEAU ON THE MARCH

Fundamentalism isn’t the problem (Kenneth Minogue, The New Criterion, June, 2004)

The outcome of public debate about these issues is that conventional wisdom currently believes that fundamentalism is a bad thing, and we must ask: what is the conventional wisdom up to? And the answer would seem to be two-fold. Firstly, it is engaging in our old friend moral equivalence. To target Muslims as the source of terrorism looks like Western civilization getting up on its high horse and denouncing the Other. We must not think we are better than others, even though the very rhetorical grammar of the term “fundamentalism” declares its users to be superior to those they are characterizing.

Secondly, it is an irresistible rhetorical triumph to be able to package together all the people of whom you disapprove in one nauseous bundle. Associating terrorists with fundamentalist Christians is, especially for some American Democrats, a deeply satisfying new take on the state of the world.

Satisfying, but of course absurd, for it amounts to saying that deeply held beliefs are always bad. It happens that our own liberal civilization is awash with convictions so deeply held that we send armies into other countries in order to spread them. We believe in human rights with such passion that we are imposing them on other civilizations as fast as we can go. We are certainly fundamentalist in spreading our views of the proper places of women in the world. Political correctness in our Western societies has been entrenched in law, and both legal and social penalties will happen if we don’t hire enough women or if we utter such words as “nigger”—or even “niggardly”—in the hearing of others. In universities on both sides of the Atlantic, secular orthodoxy demands that Christian organizations must give equal opportunity to those they construe are sinners. A prayer that gays should recognize and repent of their sin has been judged a form of sexual harassment. In whipping civil society into line with secular orthodoxy, it’s hard to get more fundamentalist than this.

The point is that we’re into motes and beams territory here. And it’s a case where moral equivalence turns out to be rather embarrassing for liberals. We know very well that Western societies find Muslims a problem because Islam demands that everyone must live in terms of the Koran as elaborated into the Sharia. Most Christians don’t make any demand quite so comprehensive, but they certainly have a problem with abortion. But liberals, for all their airy talk of tolerance, are determined that everyone should toe their own line. As every Muslim knows, liberal internationalism is a creed every bit as inclusive—fundamentalist, shall we say?—as their own. What follows from this is that to attack terrorists (and others!) as “fundamentalist” is inaccurate. Islamicists might, to cover this point, be called “textualists,” but their “fundamentalism” certainly doesn’t distinguish them from many of the people they are trying to kill.

As Spengler notes trenchantly, “The secularists who dominate American foreign policy seem to think that they can export the shell of the American system, namely its constitutional forms, without its religious kernel.”. He might also have pointed out how many of them despise that religious kernel and are determined to eradicate it from public life.

The refusal of many secularists to see themselves as anything other than brave champions of freedom and choice pitted against nasty absolutists and religious fundamentalists blinds them to the contempt they inspire and the damage they do. The growth of neither Islamicism nor African Christianity nor Hindu nationalism gives them pause, for they are by definition innocent of any responsibility for the world’s ills and can only conceive of themselves as liberators and the faithful as enslavers. So determined are they in their righteous fervor, they really don’t care what anyone else thinks or how many oppose them, for all evil is summed up in the word "intolerance" and is entirely the fault of their adversaries. They are the anointed of rational humanism and their ever-increasing anger and zeal betrays their outrage at any challenge.

To the extent that there was an element of sincerity in Arab horror over the mess at Abu Ghraib, it was not because of its cruelty, but because of its pornographic overtones. Most of the world, particularly the Third World, does not want Western-style sexual liberation, anti-family feminism, pornography, Hollywood culture, abortion, gay rights, easy divorce or many of the other libertine gifts the secular West seems determined to foist on them in the name of freedom. Only a modern secular bigot would hold this is because they don’t understand what is good for them or because they lack education. They know very well why they don’t. All the quotes from the Founding Fathers will not sway or endear a world that views the U.S. and the West as aggressive promoters of a social license that recalls Rome in its decline or the medieval Italian Church at its most corrupt.