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Western culture, si, “open society,” no
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali immigrant and member of the Dutch parliament whose life is threatened by Muslim jihadists in the Netherlands, is an important figure who points to the only real way for Muslims to cease being a problem for the rest of the world, and that is (though she does not put it in these terms) for them to cease being Muslims. Ali ought to be defended and supported for taking this incredibly courageous stand. She has even gone so far as to call for a moratorium on Muslim immigration into the Netherlands. What a gal. Unfortunately, Ali counterposes against Islam, not the traditional society of the West or of Europe or of her adopted Netherlands, but the rootless, late-liberal notion of the “open society.” She writes:
But which values are we fighting for? Those who love freedom know that the open society relies on a few key shared concepts. They believe that all humans are born free, are endowed with reason and have inalienable rights. Governments are checked by the rule of law, so that civil liberties are protected. They ensure freedom of conscience and of expression, and ensure that men and women, homosexuals and heterosexuals, are treated equally under the law. People can trade freely, and may spend their recreational time as they wish.This is the left-liberal vision of virtually unlimited individual freedom and life-style choice, a freedom divorced from any notion of the cultural and religious framework that both makes genuine freedom possible and places necessary limits on it. Such openness is, indeed, the very thing that has broken down the former morality and identity of the West and thus opened it to the mass immigration of Muslims who now threaten the West and its freedoms with complete extinction. Even worse, Hirsi Ali attacks Christianity and Judaism, lumping them with Islam as part of the problem that the open society will solve. She writes: “This process should provide an alternative to the utopia promised by terrorists—the open society, and it gives Muslims, like Christians and Jews, an opportunity to liberate themselves from the ever-present menace of hell, which is the single most effective threat the fundamentalists employ.”
I do not want to criticize Miss Ali too strongly, since she is such a brave and important ally who has literally placed her life on the line. Also, why single her out for the mistake of idealizing the open society, since that’s the ideal of most of today’s native-born white Westerners as well? Nevertheless, the error is a fundamental one, and I hope Ali will over time come to recognize that what needs to be defended and restored is not the hyper-liberal notion of the open society, but the actual, historical societies of the West. Email entry |