If the West Falls, It Will Happen Because of Stupidity

Bruce Thornton, author of Decline and Fall: Europe's Slow Motion Suicide, has an excellent article in The City entitled: "Politics Based on Illusion." His main point is extremely important: that the Ruling Class of the West - the academics, the media and the bureaucratic class - is exhibiting a massive failure of imagination. This failure of imagination renders us vulnerable and is extremely dangerous.

The great historian of Soviet Russia, Robert Conquest, once wrote something about the dangers of naïve diplomacy that I’m reminded of daily. “We are still faced with the absolutely crucial problem of making the intellectual and imaginative effort not to project our ideas of common sense or natural motivation onto the products of totally different cultures,” Conquest observed.

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America’s 30-year struggle with Islamic jihad has been defined by just this sort of failure of imagination. Yet the diplomatic pathology has much deeper roots, and reflects a larger set of assumptions about human and state behavior going back to the Enlightenment—what we can call utopian universalism. In this view, all peoples are essentially rational and want the same political and social goods, particularly personal freedom and material prosperity. If they behave irrationally or destructively in seeking other goods, blame this on the fact that they have not yet been educated to their true interests. They remain mired in ancient superstitions, particularly those of religion, ethnic loyalties, and nationalism. Yet in time, the progress of knowledge, technology, and global trade will sweep away these impediments to happiness.

This vision of human identity lies behind the idealistic internationalism that dominates inter-state relations in the West.

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Far from universal, however, these ideals reflect a particular history—that of the West—beginning in ancient Greece and Jerusalem and developed further by the Romans and Christianity. They have become globalized mainly by Western power and dominance. . . . Within the West itself, this “moralizing internationalism,” as historian Corelli Barnett calls it, was exploded by the carnage of the twentieth century, in which nationalist and ethnic loyalties, incoherent political religions like fascism and Communism, and finally a renewed religious fanaticism have created mountains of corpses.

Far from universal, however, these ideals reflect a particular history—that of the West—beginning in ancient Greece and Jerusalem and developed further by the Romans and Christianity. They have become globalized mainly by Western power and dominance.

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Despite the examples of these historical failures, we have made the same mistakes in our conflict with Islamic jihad, starting with the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Rather than attempting to understand the religious motives of Islamic jihadists, which they clearly articulate and link to their reading of traditional Islam, we reduce them instead to our own secularized, materialist beliefs.

It is extremely important to understand that not everyone in the West, let alone everybody in the world, thinks the same way and is driven by the same priorities. There is a real reductionism about human nature: all people need is food, shelter, sex and consumerist, low-brow, non-stop, 24/7 entertainment. This is a kind of crudely Marxist argument that sees all human behavior and all of history as explicable by economics.

If you think that human nature is what Darwin and Marx says it is, then you will never understand Islamic fervor, any more than you will understand traditional, orthodox Christianity.

But not understanding everything in the world is not necessarily dangerous; failing to understanding your sworn enemy - one that is fueled by petro dollars - can be deadly.