Ok, I just wanted to put some thoughts down regarding the situation between Islam and the West, as I see it. It is of course very long and very partisan. I wrote it mainly in order to flesh out my own thoughts. Feel free to ignore it or to criticize it. If someone finds it interesting, that's great. Of course it's all opinion.
Here are the things that I think we have to do to win the war against Islam.
1. We have to begin thinking beyond ISIS. Just as our gains against Al Qaeda were followed by the emergence of a new threat, our progress against ISIS will certainly be followed by the emergence of some new standard-bearer for jihad. AQ and ISIS are in the foreground; in the background are the sacred scriptures of Islam which will continue to inspire global jihad in one form or another as long as Islam exists.
2. We cannot allow our overall approach toward Islam to be handcuffed by our sentimentality toward individual Muslims. It makes no difference, in the context of the conflict we are considering, that your Muslim neighbor or coworker is a really good dude who would never wish harm on anyone. He is not in control of the future of Islam; the Madhhabs and their clerics are, and they remain devoted—as they always must—to the sacred scriptures of Islam which prescribe the eventual domination of the world by the Ummah and the governance of the world under Sharia law.
3. Our thinking has to begin to mimic the scale and pace of our adversary. Historical Islam is able to wage what the experts call "asymmetrical warfare" not only at the tactical level (where it enjoys the tremendous advantage of disregarding the value of human life), but at the strategic level as well, where its prophetic narrative affords it the patience to keep the most distant and the most millenarian goals always in mind. Historical Islam moves like a river, while we move like frogs. It calculates in terms of generations, while we calculate according to the next news cycle. It contemplates the taking of multiple wives for the sake of demographic conquest, while we encourage the latest forms of birth control so that we can more comfortably avoid the natural consequences of our own individual vanities and impulses.
4. We have to recognize that both the problem and the solution are ideological in nature. Of course some have rightly recognized that the problem is ideological; what I haven't seen anyone admit yet is that the solution must therefore also be ideological. This is a great difficulty, however, since nothing is less popular in the West than the notion of "ideology". Even the word, "ideology", is a term that represents the deprecation of what used to be called "philosophy". To even mention "ideology" is to invoke something that we already regard as doubtful; this is why nobody goes around saying that they adhere to an "ideology". We reserve the word for our enemies, for people whom we regard as naive and partisan.
Now...There are very good reasons to think that we will be unable to do any of the those things under the current social framework. The reasons for skepticism, which I've numbered below, correspond to the numbers above about what we would need to do.
1. The nature of democracy, with its election cycles and the consequent need for politicians to defend their own policies, will always frustrate any attempt to look past the foreground of an ISIS or an AQ. Instead it will always be advantageous for each new crop of politicians to celebrate their stamping out of the foreground group and also to dismiss (as long as they possibly can) the threat posed by whatever new group is emerging from the background to take up the jihad.
2. In the West, the individual has unquestioned primacy. In some ways, this is the very glory of our civilization. It is not institutions but the individual that evokes our compassion and which drags the cross of justice before even the dullest mind: and the mind is usually as dull as the heart is soft. Even in the wake of the most horrific atrocity committed in the name of Islam, the most righteous and patriotic demand for decisive action—for revenge—will be neutralized the very first time we see an innocent Muslim pulled from his home by the angry mob. Rest assured that such awful scenes will happen if we proceed to fight Islam in any kind of effective way.
3. The West is a consumer culture. It has been driven down toward the ground of its materiality over the generations. We seek to eat, to have sex, to get high, and to be entertained in a more or less continual cycle that repeats every 3 to 12 hours. The sense of any higher purpose, of moral verticality, went out long ago. We have a keen sense of what we ought to be free from, but we have zero sense of what we are free for. The virtue of courage, which would of course be a requirement to wage the kind of war that we need to wage, has been dissipated by the absence of any higher purpose. In the heat of an acute emergency, of course, a man's natural courage can always be expect to appear in heroic fashion. But in the question of a war whose arc of development is certain to last generations (or hopefully, if we're lucky, centuries), this natural virtue will have to be translated to the realm of theoretical and speculative action whose moral validity must simply be accepted as implicit in the purpose of the civilization as a whole. And the material impulse for food, sex, drugs, and entertainment cannot serve as a believable basis for that kind of courage. It will always be more justifiable to convert to Islam than to risk one's life in defense of our animalized pleasures. A civilization devoted to freedom for freedom's sake will not be enough. The freedom must point higher, and if it does not, then it will be annihilated.
4. In order to fight Islam, the West must be ideologically united. In order to be ideologically united, the West will first have to re-attach itself to some belief in ideology, or philosophy, or outlook, or purpose, or moral verticality. But in fact the Enlightenment has seemingly annihilated this possibility. The enlightenment teaches above all a strict dividing-line between facts and values. Facts are scientific and empirical; values are merely truth claims that are supported by no empirical evidence. Therefore, from the point of view of the Enlightenment, values occupy a lower rank than facts. In the sphere of facts, science rules; here we have developed an awesome array of weapons and a technical capacity that was unimaginable only a few short decades ago. This advantage, however, is completely useless if it is not oriented in the direction of some moral purpose that is informed by values. Science can never tell us toward what end it ought to be used. And the naive boast that "We will use it to kill terrorists!" is certain to shatter under the emotional weight of our sentimentality, which the terrorists have already learned to exploit, as well as the ever-ratcheting pressure that time will apply to our MTV attention span. The Left is at the very cusp of victory in the West, and it is devoted to what it regards as an un-ideology. It is impossible to imagine it stepping back from the victory which is so near, just so that it can save the civilization that it has worked so long to overthrow.
That looks very pessimistic, I know. By far our best hope is for Islam to collapse somehow under its own weight. But that hope really only subsists if we continue to think about it in strictly geographic terms. Omar Mateen and others seem to suggest, however, that this "geographic" framework is already obsolete. Every major city and most mid-sized towns in America now have mosques. And they will continue to gain followers. And we can expect that the clerics who preach in those mosques will continue either to tolerate or ignore or encourage jihad in more or less the same way that they've done so far. Thus even the hope for a Shia/Sunni conflict—if it is played out in our own neighborhoods—does us little good.
It's hard to see us walking back the glory of the Enlightenment now. We'll celebrate it to the bitter end of our own systematic annihilation.
Here are the things that I think we have to do to win the war against Islam.
1. We have to begin thinking beyond ISIS. Just as our gains against Al Qaeda were followed by the emergence of a new threat, our progress against ISIS will certainly be followed by the emergence of some new standard-bearer for jihad. AQ and ISIS are in the foreground; in the background are the sacred scriptures of Islam which will continue to inspire global jihad in one form or another as long as Islam exists.
2. We cannot allow our overall approach toward Islam to be handcuffed by our sentimentality toward individual Muslims. It makes no difference, in the context of the conflict we are considering, that your Muslim neighbor or coworker is a really good dude who would never wish harm on anyone. He is not in control of the future of Islam; the Madhhabs and their clerics are, and they remain devoted—as they always must—to the sacred scriptures of Islam which prescribe the eventual domination of the world by the Ummah and the governance of the world under Sharia law.
3. Our thinking has to begin to mimic the scale and pace of our adversary. Historical Islam is able to wage what the experts call "asymmetrical warfare" not only at the tactical level (where it enjoys the tremendous advantage of disregarding the value of human life), but at the strategic level as well, where its prophetic narrative affords it the patience to keep the most distant and the most millenarian goals always in mind. Historical Islam moves like a river, while we move like frogs. It calculates in terms of generations, while we calculate according to the next news cycle. It contemplates the taking of multiple wives for the sake of demographic conquest, while we encourage the latest forms of birth control so that we can more comfortably avoid the natural consequences of our own individual vanities and impulses.
4. We have to recognize that both the problem and the solution are ideological in nature. Of course some have rightly recognized that the problem is ideological; what I haven't seen anyone admit yet is that the solution must therefore also be ideological. This is a great difficulty, however, since nothing is less popular in the West than the notion of "ideology". Even the word, "ideology", is a term that represents the deprecation of what used to be called "philosophy". To even mention "ideology" is to invoke something that we already regard as doubtful; this is why nobody goes around saying that they adhere to an "ideology". We reserve the word for our enemies, for people whom we regard as naive and partisan.
Now...There are very good reasons to think that we will be unable to do any of the those things under the current social framework. The reasons for skepticism, which I've numbered below, correspond to the numbers above about what we would need to do.
1. The nature of democracy, with its election cycles and the consequent need for politicians to defend their own policies, will always frustrate any attempt to look past the foreground of an ISIS or an AQ. Instead it will always be advantageous for each new crop of politicians to celebrate their stamping out of the foreground group and also to dismiss (as long as they possibly can) the threat posed by whatever new group is emerging from the background to take up the jihad.
2. In the West, the individual has unquestioned primacy. In some ways, this is the very glory of our civilization. It is not institutions but the individual that evokes our compassion and which drags the cross of justice before even the dullest mind: and the mind is usually as dull as the heart is soft. Even in the wake of the most horrific atrocity committed in the name of Islam, the most righteous and patriotic demand for decisive action—for revenge—will be neutralized the very first time we see an innocent Muslim pulled from his home by the angry mob. Rest assured that such awful scenes will happen if we proceed to fight Islam in any kind of effective way.
3. The West is a consumer culture. It has been driven down toward the ground of its materiality over the generations. We seek to eat, to have sex, to get high, and to be entertained in a more or less continual cycle that repeats every 3 to 12 hours. The sense of any higher purpose, of moral verticality, went out long ago. We have a keen sense of what we ought to be free from, but we have zero sense of what we are free for. The virtue of courage, which would of course be a requirement to wage the kind of war that we need to wage, has been dissipated by the absence of any higher purpose. In the heat of an acute emergency, of course, a man's natural courage can always be expect to appear in heroic fashion. But in the question of a war whose arc of development is certain to last generations (or hopefully, if we're lucky, centuries), this natural virtue will have to be translated to the realm of theoretical and speculative action whose moral validity must simply be accepted as implicit in the purpose of the civilization as a whole. And the material impulse for food, sex, drugs, and entertainment cannot serve as a believable basis for that kind of courage. It will always be more justifiable to convert to Islam than to risk one's life in defense of our animalized pleasures. A civilization devoted to freedom for freedom's sake will not be enough. The freedom must point higher, and if it does not, then it will be annihilated.
4. In order to fight Islam, the West must be ideologically united. In order to be ideologically united, the West will first have to re-attach itself to some belief in ideology, or philosophy, or outlook, or purpose, or moral verticality. But in fact the Enlightenment has seemingly annihilated this possibility. The enlightenment teaches above all a strict dividing-line between facts and values. Facts are scientific and empirical; values are merely truth claims that are supported by no empirical evidence. Therefore, from the point of view of the Enlightenment, values occupy a lower rank than facts. In the sphere of facts, science rules; here we have developed an awesome array of weapons and a technical capacity that was unimaginable only a few short decades ago. This advantage, however, is completely useless if it is not oriented in the direction of some moral purpose that is informed by values. Science can never tell us toward what end it ought to be used. And the naive boast that "We will use it to kill terrorists!" is certain to shatter under the emotional weight of our sentimentality, which the terrorists have already learned to exploit, as well as the ever-ratcheting pressure that time will apply to our MTV attention span. The Left is at the very cusp of victory in the West, and it is devoted to what it regards as an un-ideology. It is impossible to imagine it stepping back from the victory which is so near, just so that it can save the civilization that it has worked so long to overthrow.
That looks very pessimistic, I know. By far our best hope is for Islam to collapse somehow under its own weight. But that hope really only subsists if we continue to think about it in strictly geographic terms. Omar Mateen and others seem to suggest, however, that this "geographic" framework is already obsolete. Every major city and most mid-sized towns in America now have mosques. And they will continue to gain followers. And we can expect that the clerics who preach in those mosques will continue either to tolerate or ignore or encourage jihad in more or less the same way that they've done so far. Thus even the hope for a Shia/Sunni conflict—if it is played out in our own neighborhoods—does us little good.
It's hard to see us walking back the glory of the Enlightenment now. We'll celebrate it to the bitter end of our own systematic annihilation.
