HEMLOCK SOCIETY:

The assassin's master sermon: Horrified as they may be by the thought, Westerners have something to learn from the letter that Mohammed B pinned with a knife to Theo van Gogh's corpse after he murdered the Dutch filmmaker this month. The message: antagonistic modes of faith underlie the conflict between the West and the Islamic world. (Spengler, 11/15/04, Asia Times)

If you are so convinced of your philosophy, asks the writer, why do you not wish for death? We jihadis, he implies, welcome death, and if your conviction is as strong as ours, you should do no less. Westerners should think twice before despising this line of reasoning. Socrates, after all, argued that the true philosopher should wish for death before he drank the hemlock, and he chose the hemlock over exile because he could exist as nothing other than an Athenian. I made this point in Socrates the destroyer (May 25), an essay that attracted virtually no readers because its conclusions are so unsettling. After the Peloponnesian War, which doomed Athenian culture, Socrates' existential choice was rather more understandable.

The presentiment of death (Franz Rosenzweig's phrase) haunts the Arab mind. A senescent culture that has fallen behind in every aspect of human endeavor - economic, scientific, cultural and military - faces absorption into the hostile world of globalization. As I wrote on August 10 (Islam: Religion or political ideology?):

Traditional society is the locus of the vast majority of the world's billion Muslims. Global communications and the social freedoms embodied in the US system threaten the existence of these societies. For most of the world's Muslims the United States is a menace, not a promise, threatening to dissolve the ties that bind child to parent, wife to husband, tribesman to chief, subject to ruler. Traditional society will not go mutely to its doom and join the Great Extinction of the Peoples, blotting out ancient cultures and destroying the memory of today's generation. It will not permit the hundreds of millions of Muslims on the threshold of adulthood to pass into the world of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, and lose the memory of their ancestors. On the contrary: it will turn the tables upon the corrupt metropolis, and in turn launch a war of conquest against it.

Radical Islam stems from despair in the face of cultural death; precisely for that reason it bespeaks a ghastly indifference toward individual death, analogous to the Mut der Verzweiflung, or courage borne of desperation, that impels the soldiers of a defeated army toward a final charge at the enemy cannon. Absolute certainty informs the faith of the assassin Mohammed B, but it is the certainty of cultural extinction that makes the death of the individual the supreme test of faith. Existential despair inspires the conclusion that better than defeat is to fight to the death. Peace is to be achieved when those who hold this view will have had the opportunity to do so (More killing, please!, June 12, 2003).

Spengler misses one point here that he's well aware of: secular Europe, which unlike Islam is actually killing itself, is just as much in the grip of Existential despair as are Islamicists. Indeed, its despair is so great that Europeans won't even fight to fend off their decline and fall. The Islamicists may just be Europe's Jack Kevorkian.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 15, 2004 8:49 AM