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ScrWest 03-3-31 |
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THE WEST AND THE REST Globalization and The Terrorist Threat Roger Scruton Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2002, 187 pp. ISBN 1-882926-81-1 |
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Roger
Scruton is a prominent English philosopher and writer. This little book offers profound insight
into the conflicts of our day. “In this
book I explore the vision of society and political order that lies at the
heart of ‘Western civilization.’ And
I try to show how the apparent conflict with Islam is fed by the decay of
that vision, and the loss of the political loyalty on which it depends.” (x) “If all
that Western civilization offers is freedom, then it is a civilization bent
on its own destruction. Moreover
freedom flaunted in the face of religious prohibitions is an act of
aggression, inviting retribution from those whose piety it offends.” (viii) “Islamic
civilization…defines itself in terms not of freedom but of submission.” “The muslim is the one who has
surrendered, submitted, and so obtained security. In that complex etymological knot is tied a vision of society
and its rewards far different from anything that has prevailed in modern
Europe and America.” (viii) “…while
no Western citizens are fleeing from the West, 70 percent of the world’s
refugees are Muslims fleeing from places where their religion is the official
doctrine.” “…having arrived in the
West, many of these Muslim refugees begin to conceive a hatred of the society
by which they find themselves surrounded…”
(ix) Ch 1.
The Social Context
Western
societies are governed by politics; the rest are ruled by power. (7) “Contracts
are the paradigms of self-chosen obligations…. …obedience to the law is simply the other side of free
choice. Freedom and obedience are one
and the same.” (8) “There cannot be a society without this
experience of membership. For it is
this that enables me to regard the interests and needs of strangers as my
concern; that enables me to recognize the authority of decisions and laws
that I must obey, even though they are not directly in my interest.” (13) In Muslim
eyes the intricate laws and maxims of the Koran give legitimacy to the
political order: a thought which has the disturbing corollary that the
political order is almost everywhere illegitimate, and nowhere more so than
in the states where Islam is the official faith.” (15) “Where
there is no political process, everything that happens is of interest to
those in power, since it poses a potential threat to them.” (17) In a
region of creed communities, there was no alternative to empire. Legal systems installed by the European
powers crumbled before feudal despotism, hereditary monarchy, or the peculiar
combination of gangster terrorism and Leninist one-party rule imposed through
the Ba’th party of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. (29) There is
little more to Arab political unity than a shared antipathy to
Israel. The real unity remains today
is the unity of a creed community with a common language sanctified by a holy
text. And the only unity that the
people really believe in is also an unrealizable fiction whose political
enactment entails bloodshed, tyranny, and war.” (34) “…the
history of the Middle East reminds us of a far more important legacy of
Christianity, which is the extolling of forgiveness as a moral virtue.” “The
Muslim faith…is defined through a prayer, …a declaration: There is one God,
and Muhammad is his Prophet. To which
might be added: and you had better believe it. The Christian prayer is also a declaration of faith; but it
includes the crucial words: ‘forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them
that trespass against us.’” (36) “There is no coherent reading of the
Christian message that does not make forgiveness of enemies into a central
item of the creed.” (38) “If I am
attacked and turn the other cheek, then I exemplify the Christian virtue of
meekness. If I am entrusted with a
child who is attacked, and I then turn the child’s other cheek, I make
myself party to the violence. That,
surely, is how a Christian should understand the right of defense, and how it
is understood by the medieval theories of the just war. The right of defense stems from your
obligations to others.” (38) “The Christian
injunction to forgive is therefore compatible with defensive warfare. But it is incompatible with terrorism, and
inimical to those visceral antagonisms that lead one group into a war of
extermination against another.” (39) Ch 2.
Enlightenment, Citizenship, and Loyalty
National
loyalty requires a common language.
“And it is threatened by too great an attachment to exclusive ways of
life, to militant religions, and to customs that invade the public space and
privatize it…. One of the great
difficulties facing Western societies today is that of integrating immigrant
communities into a form of life that perceives exclusion, militancy, and
public displays of religious apartness as threats to the experience of
membership. And the perception here
is self-confirming. That which is
perceived as a threat becomes a threat.
Such is the nature of home.”
(51) Traditional
Muslim Arab societies are stiff with obligations: obligations to family, to
friends, to tribe…. And over these
obligations is laid the supreme mantle of a divine law, which must be obeyed
not because of human choice but in spite of it.” Interests of strangers are comparatively disregarded and the
law is incompetent to deal with people who do not subscribe to the official
religion. (52) “A modern
democracy is a society of strangers.
Strangers…act upon obligations to those they don’t know.” “The comparative absence of this
disposition from the Islamic countries in the Middle East has had
catastrophic consequences, as attitudes shaped by religion and family ties
try to adapt themselves to a world made by strangers.” The desire to seek refuge in family,
tribe, or religion invites the dictator to take charge.” (53) “Democracy…depends
upon maintaining the public spirit of the citizens if it is not to degenerate
into a battleground for special interests.”
(54) There are “three
paramount virtues of the citizen: law-abidingness, sacrifice in war, and
public spirit in peacetime.”
(55) It involves rising above
the present moment and adopting the long-term view. (58) The three
virtues that sustain citizenship in Muslim societies are abiding by the shari’a,
sacrificing oneself if needed in jihad, and paying a tenth to the zakat. “But these are duties owed to God, not to
strangers, and the meticulous fulfillment of them may sometimes heal society,
and sometimes blow it apart.” (60) Nations
must be renewed and they can be renewed from many sources: youth movements,
education, marriage and family, a patriotic culture. “The weakness of the national idea is that
all those ways of renewal are tentative when not endorsed and protected by a
single overarching religion.” (61) “When the
news came of the September 11 attacks, many immigrant communities in France,
Germany, and Britain took to the streets in rejoicing. It became suddenly apparent…that the
loyalties on which the European Rechstaat are founded are not
automatically shared by those who come from elsewhere to enjoy their
protection.” (62) Why do
Western governments permit representatives of minorities to express hatred
and belligerence of this kind (like the mad Mullah in Britain who is
recruiting and sending fanatics to murder British citizens overseas – for
which an Englishman would end up in jail)?
“The answer is simple: a loss of national identity and of the old
experience of membership that goes with it.” (62) “The
official view in most Western countries is that…cultures should be allowed
complete freedom to develop in our territory, regardless of whether they
conform to the root standards of behavior that prevail here. As a result, the ‘multicultural’ idea has
become a form of apartheid. All
criticism of minority cultures is censored out of public debate, and
newcomers quickly conclude that it is possible to reside in a European state
as an antagonist and still enjoy all the rights and privileges that are the
reward of citizenship.” (63) “…we in
the ‘West’ enjoy a single political culture, with the nation-state as the
object of a common loyalty, and a secular conception of law, which makes
religion a concern of family and society, but not of the state. People who see all law, all social
identity, and all loyalty as issuing from a religious source cannot really
form part of this political culture, and will not recognize either the
obligation to the state or the love of country on which it is founded.” (63) “This
does not mean that religion should be excluded entirely from the affairs of
state, or that we should endorse the kind of fanatical expulsion of faith
from public institutions that has recently been practices in America.”
(64) “Nevertheless, even the most
religious of ordinary Americans will recognize that the state itself should
not be subject to religious control.
…the Constitution and the rule of law take precedence over all
religious loyalties.” (64) “The
American people stand and fall together as a nation; and it is as a nation
that they are hated by the extremists.”
(64) “Christians
will agree that obedience to the secular law is impossible when that law
conflicts with the law of God. But
there is a great difference between the Christian and the Islamic
interpretation of what this means.
For the Christian the law of God coincides with the moral precepts
laid down in the Ten Commandments, which were reduced by Christ to just
two—namely, to love God entirely and to love your neighbor as yourself. These commandments do not replace the
secular law but constrain it. They
set limits to what the sovereign can command: but so long as the sovereign
does not transgress those limits, the secular law retains absolute authority
over the citizen.” (65-6) “Islamic
jurisprudence does not recognize secular…jurisdiction as a genuine source of
law.” (66) “The
ruling problem of Western societies today, then, is this: the experience of
membership required by the Enlightenment idea of the citizen is dwindling,
and a ‘culture of repudiation’ is coming in its place. Young people gain nothing from this
culture save bewilderment and the loss of any sense of identity. If they come from immigrant backgrounds
that preserve the memory of a religious law, they will often enthusiastically
revert to a religious experience of membership in opposition to the
territorial jurisdiction by which they are ostensibly governed.” (67-8) The
Culture of Repudiation “…rights
must be paid for by duties, and the call to duty is effective only in the
context of a common loyalty.” When
loyalty erodes…”the political process becomes a scramble to claim as much
from the common resources as they will yield….” (68) The old
loyalties to our history, our traditional values, our religion, our
traditional lifestyles, etc. are being shattered by aggressive and intolerant
multi-culturalism, feminism, advocacy of alternative lifestyles, political
correctness, and denunciation of Christianity, in academia and the media,
etc. “The culture of the elite has
undergone a kind of ‘moral inversion’.
Permission turns to prohibition, as the advocacy of alternatives gives
way to a war against the former orthodoxy.”
(71) “The
‘down with us’ mentality is devoted to rooting out old and unsustainable
loyalties. And when the old loyalties
die, so does the old form of membership.”
(73) “The
spirit of free inquiry is now disappearing from schools and universities in
the West. Books are put on or struck
off the curriculum on grounds of political correctness; speech codes and
counseling services police the language and conduct of both students and
teachers; many courses are designed to impart ideological conformity rather
than to inspire rational inquiry….” “When the
experience of membership can no longer be obtained in such a way, a new kind
of inquiry takes over, one explicitly directed towards a promised social
goal.” “A single theme runs through
the humanities as they are regularly taught in American and European
universities: the illegitimacy of Western civilization….” (79) “The
Enlightenment displaced theology from the heart of the curriculum in order to
put the disinterested pursuit of truth in its place. Within a very short time, however, we find
the university dominated by theology of another kind—a godless theology, to
be sure, but no less insistent upon unquestioning submission to doctrine, and
no less ardent in its pursuit of heretics, skeptics, and debunkers.” (80) “The
‘non-judgmental’ attitude towards other cultures goes hand-in-hand with a
fierce denunciation of the culture that might have been one’s own….” “The assault on the old cultural
inheritance leads to no new form of membership, but only to a kind of
alienation.” (81) Why does
this culture define itself negatively?
“The answer lies surely in the mounting religious deficit in modern
societies….” (81) “People
are being brought into connection who have no real way of accommodating one
another, and the spectacle of Western freedom and Western prosperity, going
hand-in-hand with Western decadence and the crumbling of Western loyalties,
is bound to provoke, in those who envy the one and despise the other, a
seething desire to punish.” (83) Ch 3.
Holy Law
“The
unsatisfied religious need of Western societies coincides with a process of
globalization that spreads the message of Western decadence around the
world. In this chapter I try to
understand the impact of that message on the Muslim conscience, and the
impact of Islam on people now living in the West.” (85) Only 20%
of Muslims are now Arabs. 5-10% of
Arabs are Christians. (85) Law is
fundamental to Islam. Law is the will
of God and sovereignty is legitimate only in so far as it upholds God’s
will. This involves “a
confiscation of the political.”
The judgments of an authority can always be questioned by a rival
authority. (88, 91) The whole
life of a community is a set of absolutes, no law clearly more important than
others. Everything is owed to God and
nothing to Caesar. (92) The Koran
sees society as people bound by family and tribal ties but answerable to God
alone. Institutions are not within
its scope. There is no foundation for
an impersonal political order. The
office of imam is assumed but has no institutional authority. Authority is bestowed directly by the
power of God. (93) “Those
who rule in the Prophet’s name seldom satisfy their subjects that they are
entitled to do so….” “Islamic
revivals almost always begin from a sense of corruption and godlessness of
the ruling power….” (94) Since
much of the Koran was written after the Prophet was exiled, “In the eyes of
the Koran the place where we are is not the place where we belong, since the
place where we belong is in the wrong hands:
Our law therefore does not issue from our present place of abode, and
gives special privileges only to the other place, which may one day be
reconquered.” (97) The shari’a
governs only Muslims, so other communities are “outside the law” and must
either convert or be protected by treaty or covenant. (99) “The
Muslim city is explicitly a city for Muslims, a place of congregations in
which individuals and their families live side-by-side in obedience to God,
and where non-Muslims exist only on sufferance.” (100) Muslims
are apt to feel both wonder and rage at the God-defying arrogance that has so
completely eclipsed the life of piety and prayer” (in a Western city). “When he led the attack against the World
Trade Center, Atta was assaulting a symbol of economic, aesthetic, and
spiritual paganism.” (101) Islam
experiences “the intense longing for that original and pure community once
promised by the Prophet but betrayed over and again by his worldly successors
and followers. Like every form of
nostalgia, this longing involves a turning away from reality, a refusal to
accommodate or even to perceive the facts that might undermine it, and an
endlessly renewable anger against the Other who refuses to share in the
collective dream.” (102) “Islam
has an unrivalled ability to compensate for what is lacking in modern
experience. It rationalizes and
validates the condition of exile….”
“Islam…is less a theological doctrine than a system of piety. To submit to it is to discover the rules
for a trouble-free life and an easy conscience.” “It has the singular advantage…of clarity.” (104-5) “In the
context of Western anomie and self-indulgence, therefore, Muslim immigrants
cling to their faith, seeing it inevitably as something superior to the
surrounding moral chaos, and therefore more worthy of their obedience than
the law that permits so much sin.”
(105) An
Islamic education teaches piety, consideration, and respect for age; it
offers a clear rite of passage into the adult world; it presents the student
at every point with certainties rather than doubts, and consolation rather
than anxiety.” “In short, it is an
education that provides what the liberal systems of education in Western
states have, disastrously, despised—authority.” “The education offered by our schools does not impart a common
culture; it gives little guidance for life, few certainties, and unequal
skills.” (106) For
governing a large society, shari’a is radically deficient. Every ruler must lay down laws of his own
to guarantee his power, facilitate administration, and collect taxes. But since there is no legitimacy for
secular laws, he must maintain his rule by power. (107) Turkey
has been the only durable democracy in the Muslim world, maintained by
frequent interventions by a loyal army.
In the process Turkey has been severed from its classical
culture. In the search for a modern
identity, young people are attracted to radical and destabilizing ideologies,
both Islamist and utopian. The
al-Qua’eda organization is one significant result. (109) It derives from
three pre-existing sociopolitical forces: the Wahhabite movement in Saudi
Arabia; the Muslim Brotherhood that emerged in modern Egypt; and, finally,
the technological education now available to disaffected Muslims throughout the
Middle East.” (110) “The
Wahhabis preached purity of lifestyle and absolute obedience to the
Koran….” (111) “The search for that original
purity…continues to exert its subterranean influence in the heartlands of
Islam, breaking out in acts of violence and rebellion.” (113) “The
Brotherhood (1928) was to be a return to the militant Islam of the Prophet,
the goal to re-establish the reign of purity and piety.” Within a decade it had become the
best-organized indigenous political force in Egypt. After WWII, it ran a campaign of terrorism to ‘bear witness’ to
Islamic truth against the infidel. By
1949 the Brotherhood had trained more than 100 terrorists from other Islamic
countries. (114-15) Many of
the ideological leaders are graduates in technical or scientific
subjects. Their scientific training
opens to them the secrets of Western technology while revealing the emptiness
of a civilization in which only technology matters. (117) The
virtues of Western political systems are viewed in the Islamic mind as
hideous moral failings. Human rights
and secular governments display the decadence of Western civilization. (119) Khomeini
is important because 1) he showed that an Islamic government is a viable
option and Westernization and secularization are not inevitable, 2) the
Islamic Revolution was the cornerstone of his foreign policy, and 3) he made
martyrdom a central part of his Islamic revival strategy. Khomeini’s call to sacrifice (martyrdom)
was enthusiastically received by many young people, and even by their
parents! (120-21) The
Shi’ites are convinced that the powers of the world always corrupt Islam and
that it must constantly be returned to its original purity. (121) “The cult
of death seems to make sense of a world in which evil prevails; moreover it
gives unprecedented power to the martyr, who no longer has anything to
fear. The cult is both a protest
against modern nihilism and a form of it—a last-ditch attempt to rescue Islam
from the abyss of nothingness by showing that it can still demand the
ultimate proof of devotion.” (122) “It is
not too great an exaggeration to say that this new confluence of Sunni
orthodoxy and Shi’ite extremism has laid the foundations for a worldwide
Islamic revival. For the first time
in centuries Islam appears, both in the eyes of its followers and in the eyes
of the infidel, to be a single religious movement united around a single
goal. Nor is it an exaggeration to
suggest that one major factor in producing this unwonted unity is Western
civilization and the process of globalization that it has set in
motion.” (123) Ch 4.
Globalization
“Where
Islamists succeed in gaining power—as in Iran, Sudan, and Afghanistan—the
result is not the reign of peace and piety promised by the Prophet, but
murder and persecution on a scale matched in our time only by the Nazis and
the Communists. The Islamist, like
the Russian nihilist, is an exile in this world; and when he succeeds in
obtaining power over his fellow human beings, it is in order to punish them
for being human.” (127) “Globalization…means
the transfer of social, economic, political, and juridical power to global
organizations,…that are located in no particular sovereign jurisdiction, and
governed by no particular territorial law.
The growth of such organizations is, in my view, a regrettable
by-product of our addiction to freedom.
…these organizations pose a new kind of threat to the only form of
sovereignty that has brought lasting (albeit local) peace to our planet. And when terrorism too becomes globalized,
the threat is amplified a hundred-fold.”
(127) “With al-Qu’eda, therefore, we encounter
the real impact of globalization on the Islamic revival. To belong to this ‘base’ is to accept no
territory as home, and no human law as authoritative. It is to commit oneself to a state of
permanent exile, while at the same time resolving to carry out God’s work of
punishment.” (128) “Islamism
is not a cry of distress from the ‘wretched of the earth.’ It is an implacable summons to war, issued
by globetrotting middle-class Muslims, many of them extremely wealthy….” (131)
“It may be hard to sympathize with these spoiled and self-indulgent
advocates of violence. But it is not
hard to sympathize with the feelings upon which they depend for their following.” (132) “In the
eyes of its critics [globalization] means the loss of sovereignty, together
with large-scale social, economic, and aesthetic disruption. It also means an invasion of images that
evoke outrage and disgust as much as envy in the hearts of those who are
exposed to them.” If you believe that
“…happiness resides not in freedom but in submission to God’s law, the impact
of pornography is devastating. No
less devastating, for pious Muslims, are what they see as the indecent
clothes and behavior of young women in the West—clothes and behavior that are
in no way modified when those women travel on business or as tourists to
Muslim countries, there to presume on a toleration which they are willing to
reciprocate but do little or nothing to earn.” (132) “Western
habits, Western morals, Western art, music, and television are seen not as
freedoms but as temptations. And the
normal response to temptation is either to give in to it, or to punish those
who offer it. Many Muslim muhajiroun
do both.” (133) “Globalization…concentrates
the resolve of the believer and offers him a sword with which to prosecute
God’s will.” (133) The
principal target al-Qa’eda wants to destroy is the U.S. “It is not the American people who are the
enemy. It is the American state,
conceived as an autonomous agent acting freely on the stage of international
politics, and so calling on itself the wrath of God.” “The Great White Satan” – literally. (134)
A nation-state is not merely a collection of individuals. It is a moral and legal person. “There is
no such entity as Iraq, only a legal fiction erected by the U.N. for the
purpose of dealing with whichever individual, clique, or faction is for the
moment holding the people of that country hostage.” “The states of the
non-Western world are impersonal states, machines in their rulers’
hands.” (135) The 9/11
attacks were assaults on the person of the United States…. “The difference between ‘the West and the
rest’ is captured in this idea of the corporate person….” (136)
“Personal states have an inherent preference for negotiation over
compulsion, and for peace over war.”
“And they foster the growth of a national loyalty and a territorial
jurisdiction in which the absolute demands of religion are tempered by the overarching
need for toleration and common obedience to a secular power.” (137) “The
personal state is answerable to its citizens….” By contrast, outside the ‘West’, we have the one-party state,
the religious state, individual tyranny, and anarchy. None of these has full corporate
personality. They lack effective
internal opposition. Decisions are
made by an unanswerable minority and imposed willy-nilly on the country. (138) “Any
conflict with a non-personal state is therefore a conflict with some faction
or individual within it. There cannot
be victory in such a conflict unless the faction or individual is
destroyed.” “The formal defeat of
Iraq was the defeat of a legal fiction.
The real victory was that of Saddam, who retained control over his subjects
in the face of an alliance of nation-states that proved powerless to unseat
him.” (139) Israel is
surrounded by tyrannies, factional groupings, and terrorist movements that
have only a fictitious personality.
Arafat has recognition but no authority to pursue accommodation with
Israel or to lead the Palestinans in all-out war. Nor can he control the terrorists. It is pointless to either
destroy Arafat or negotiate with him since he does not represent the people. All negotiation is futile and all force
unfocused. It is nearly impossible to
make peace when there is no accountable agent with whom to negotiate. (141-2) “It is
Israel’s relation to America that makes Israel the target of militant
Islam. The Palestinians have a
legitimate grievance. But the Muslim
states of the Middle East have done little or nothing to support them in this
grievance. Instead they have
exploited it for their own imperial ends….”
“When Israel became the target for the Islamic militants of Hizbullah
it was not in order to achieve some settlement favorable to the Palestinian
people. It was in order to punish
Israel as an outreach of the West in the dar al-islam. The Islamic militants can therefore be
satisfied with nothing short of the total destruction of Israel. For Israel is a nation-state established
where no nation-state should be—a place where the only law should be the shari’a,
and the only loyalty that of Islam.”
(143) “While it
is possible to bring pressure to bear on individual states that harbor
terrorists, this pressure is ineffective against a failed state, or against a
state like Iran, which is happy to ignore requests from Satan.” (144) Re
terrorists: “Similarly the French
have refused to police the entrance to the channel tunnel, knowing that the
best way to rid themselves of illegal immigrants is by passing them on to
Britain, where the welfare deal is more attractive.” (153) The
European Union is rapidly destroying the territorial jurisdictions and
national loyalties and therefore offers a breeding ground for Islamic
terrorists. “All the principal actors
in the atrocities of September 11 had resided in Europe, and received there
both training and indoctrination through the local cells of al-Qa’eda. The plot to attack America was not hatched
in any Muslim country, but on the continent where the West began.” (154) Ch 5.
Conclusion
“Many
terrorists are nihilists, who wish to vent their disappointment by destroying
the sham society by which they are surrounded.” “The death of God leaves only one remaining absolute, which is
Nothingness. The duty to annihilate
is the last remaining glimpse of the transcendental in the heart of the one
who has lost all belief in it and who cannot live with the loss.” (157) “Globalization
has plunged the Islamic world into crisis by offering the spectacle of a
secular society maintained in being by man-made laws, and achieving
equilibrium without the aid of God.”
At the same time it has re-awakened the age-old nostalgia for a reign
of goodness in which the corrupt are destroyed. “In the Muslim territories themselves, however, possibilities
for organized political action are limited or non-existent. Only in the West….” (158) “Unable
either to organize opposition in their country of origin, or to join the
society in which they live, they are therefore drawn to religious violence as
the only proof of their identity.” In the
West we must reinforce the nation-state.
We must reexamine some of our assumptions:
“Terrorism is not, after
all, an enemy, but a method used by the enemy.” The enemy is the tyrant dictator and the religious fanatic whom
the tyrant protects. “To act against
the first is feasible, if we are prepared to play by the tyrant’s rules. But to act against the second requires a
credible alternative to the absolutes with which he conjures. It requires us not merely to believe in
something, but to study how to put our beliefs into practice.” (161) |
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