Why the avant garde, and liberalism, are finished

Nick Cohen of The Guardian recently visited a gallery in the East End of London to see “Sonofagod Pictures: Was Jesus Heterosexual?”, an exhibit created by two homosexual artists who have been praised for being “in rebellion, [mounting] an assault on the laws and institutions of superstition and religious belief,” and for providing a “frisson of excitement” by including in their work “f-words, turds, semen, their own pallid bodies and other affronts to bourgeois sensibilities.” Surveying the scene, Cohen realized that Britain’s avant garde is dead, killed by its own subservience to Islam. How can the brave transgressors of taboos keep sticking it to the bourgeoisie and the Christians, when these same tribunes of unlimited expressive freedom are simultaneously suppressing anything offensive to Muslims?

I’ve been saying for years that in the wake of 9/11 modern liberalism—meaning the belief in universal tolerance and freedom from all constraints, combined with a hostility or indifference to the traditional West—is doomed. But now it becomes apparent that there are two ways for liberalism to die. The first way, the one I’ve often talked about, is that liberalism shows itself as unwilling to defend the West against the Islamic threat, and so becomes discredited in Western politics. The second—a variation on the first that has become apparent in the cartoon jihad—is that liberalism actively surrenders to Islamic tyranny, and simply goes out of existence.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 19, 2006 02:39 PM | Send