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To make democratization believable, neocons erase the differences between the West and Islam
Here is further evidence of what total ideologues the neoconservatives have become. In the March Commentary, a letter questioning the social scientist James Q. Wilson’s hopes for Moslem democratization argues that Arabs are “more comfortable with despotism” than we are. Wilson replies:
I am deeply suspicious of the unsupported view that people are “comfortable” with authoritarian rule. The same could be said of the West from the time of imperial Rome to the 17th century; but freedom, once offered, proved an irresistible lure to people. I do not know why anyone should think Muslims will be different.First, notice how Wilson treats freedom as though it were, not the result of a slow development of understandings, habits, and institutions over centuries, but simply a commodity that is “offered” to people, which exercises a “lure” to them, and which they eagerly seize upon. Hey, we like freedom, so the Moslems will too! Second, notice how this reduction of freedom to a commodity, and of human beings and cultures to consumers of that commodity, leads Wilson to say that he knows of no possible reason why Moslems should not take to freedom as readily as we do. It’s not just that Wilson thinks Moslem democratization is readily achievable; it’s that he thinks there’s absolutely no legitimate ground for thinking otherwise (an assumption that has led democratizers such as Vice President Cheney and Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute to say that it’s “racist” to suggest that Moslems are not capable of democracy). All considerations of history and of the distinct laws and characteristics of different religions and folkways—for example, the fact that Islamic sharia is the very opposite of freedom—which lead people to doubt the prospects of Moslem democratization are cast aside. Third, notice the radical reduction of our own civilization that is required in order to make this democratization project believable. The West was once “authoritarian,” and then it become “free.” In the same way, the Islamic world is now “authoritarian,” and so it too can become “free.” To make the Moslems seem “just like us,” Wilson portrays everything in pre-modern Western history as though it were the equivalent of Moslem despotism. For the neocons, as for liberal and leftist ideologues generally, history consists of only two periods of time: our own time, which is enlightened and free, and the time before our time, which was a pit of darkness, superstition, and tyranny. The whole of pre-modern Western civilization is thus thrown into the trash bin. The formation of Christian European nations out of the ruins of the Western Roman empire; the Carolingian Renaissance; the birth of free towns and cities and the growth of a middle class; the High Middle Ages and its extraordinarily flowering of religion, archiectecture, art, and literature; Magna Carta; the development of the English common law—the pre-modern West was not only a great civilization in itself (and in crucial respects far higher than our own), but the matrix out of which our modern world, including our notions of liberty, grew. Wilson, for ideological purposes, reduces it all to “authoritarianism.” Since we went from “authoritarianism” to “freedom” the moment it was “offered” to us, he argues, the Moslems will do likewise.
The lesson is that the democratist/one-world/open-borders project doesn’t lead only to the destruction of our civilization’s present and future, but of its past as well. Email entry |