The war of ultimates

Reposted from donaldsensing.com; links were good at time of original

Religious war is back in full force

There have been several, though not a lot, of causes of war in history. Some theorists have said that all wars' causes really devolve down to the one and same cause, "population pressure" in the words of Robert Heinlein or "resource intensification and depletion" in the work of anthropologist Marvin Harris, which is another way of saying the same thing.

But these theories do not account for the influence of religion or ideology in militarizing a society to the point that it launches aggressive war upon its neighbors. For example even if we allow that population pressure reached critical mass for the ancient, pre-empire Romans, it does not explain why they decided to manage the crisis through military expansion rather than increased trade or other peaceful arrangements.

Populations, not just individuals, are prone to delusions of grandeur. Whatever made the Romans set off toward empire, the time came when empire was its own justification. Conquest "for the glory of Rome" was reason enough. Ideologies are always self-justifying. For all its achievements in engineering and law, the Roman empire was cruel and harshly oppressive.

Germany had been bled white by the Great War (as had France and England), and had suffered enormous deaths from the postwar influenza epidemic that took more lives than the war, worldwide. But those human losses didn't stop Hitlerism from taking root and growing into the nihilistic monstrosity that shook the world.

Religion is not immune, of course, to the dangers of sliding into ideological absolutism. Before the end of the Roman empire, the Church had become a heavy political player in its own right, culminating the right of the Pope to crown Charlemagne as emperor, a right that continued until Napoleon snatched the crown from the Pope's hands and placed it on his head himself.

With the crowns of Europe and the seat of Peter in a mutually back-scratching relationship (most of the time), a strange religious-political symbiosis developed that finally enabled Pope Urban to command them to conquer the Holy Land from Muslim rule in the name of Christ. That Europe had been fighting the Islamic empire for a few hundred years, in varying intensity, made the command much easier to obey. But it did turn a rather conventional series of wars about territory into a Holy War all around.

Territorial disputes can be permanently resolved. "54-40 or fight!" never became a war cry because Britain considered the land concerned - a border dispute in the American northwest - was not worth fighting for. Now the matter has been relegated to history, never to rise again.

But religious and ideological conflicts (RICs) exist not on the earth, but in the mind. What is at stake is not fishing rights or trade routes or minerals or arable land, but the warring parties' fundamental understanding of reality and their place in it. Although mundane concerns are never entirely absent from RICs, they really form the opportunity for conflict rather than the underlying cause. The cause is absolutism that allows for no competitors.

I think the American Civil War fits into that category. It's a little too facile to say that had the North and South known in early 1861 that warring over their respective, irreconcilable ideologies would take hundreds of thousands of lives, that they would have found another way to resolve them. I'm not so sure they would have or could have. As Lincoln said, the country could not continue to exist half slave and half free. No compromise was possible any longer. They had all been tried.

The war on terror is a war of ultimates, too, although I don't think that many people of the West realize it. Our al Qaeda enemies certainly do. Al Qaeda, however, is more extreme than post-Roman Western history is generally familiar with (Nazism being a notable exception) because Islam is the most complete merger of politics and religion the world has seen since its inception, certainly more complete than, say, bushido Japan.

An historical, basic tenet of Islam, not just radicalized Islam, is that all human affairs of any kind must be under divine control, mediated through sharia. The present, clear separation of religion and politics that the West took centuries to develop is formally absent from Islam, the radical variety or not. Fortunately, most Islamic societies have honored this total integration only in the breach. But al Qaeda et. al. say that the return of Islamic societies to the rule of strict sharia law is a non-negotiable goal. (It can be argued, I think, that no such "return" is possible for the simple reason it never really existed as al Qaeda thinks. Islamic societies are really post-Muhammed, and they immediately began adjusting the tenets to cultural and political realities, all the while claiming they were the True Faithful.)

Islam, not just the radicalized version, teaches that Allah's control over events of the world and human life is total and complete. Pretty much the extent of human free will is either to rebel against Allah or to submit. Yet even rebellion is, somehow, under the controlling purview of Allah. Everything that happens, without exception, is the preordained will of Allah.

Osama bin Laden bombed two American embassies in Africa killing mostly Muslim Africans by the hundreds. The Quran prohibits murder, and especially forbids Muslims from killing other Muslims. An ABC reporter subsequently managed to interview bin Laden and asked him whether he was responsible for the deaths of the other Muslims. No, replied OBL, I am a tool of Allah, and whatever I do is determined to happen by Allah. Those people would have died at that time in any event, because it was Allah's will that they die.

In Islam, Allah holds all the power marbles. Humanity has no true self will or self power.

Bin Laden's sort of self-justifying extremism is not the mainstream of Islam, but neither is it as far removed as we might imagine. Fatalism is a characteristic of Islam. There is no human freedom. Human liberty, especially as Americans think of it, is literally a foreign concept to Islam, especially Arab Islam.

We say that the defining idea of American liberty is "self evident:" Human beings "are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." This claim has no natural fit with Islam. The idea that humans, created by the power of Allah, could inherently possess unalienable rights of their own, which no authority may remove, would require Islam to surrender the idea that Allah enjoys meticulous control over all affairs of nature and humankind. But this notion is lethally dangerous to the defining idea of Islam itself: that Allah has all the power.

Liberty as we conceive it is at the heart of the conflict. For Muslims, the most desirable state of human society is not one that is free, in the Western sense, but one that is submissive to Allah, according to the dictates of Quran. This state of society is dar al Islam, the world of peace. Anything else is the dar al harb, the "world of war." Societies, peoples or nations are either at war with Allah or at peace (through submission) to Allah.

This concept of submission is the matter of ultimate concern to Islam generally and is enormously amplified by radicalized Islamists such as Osama bin Laden and his allies. Hand in hand with this ultimate concern are what we would think of as territorial, political, legal and social concerns, namely the ejection of non-Muslims from Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf countries, the imposition of strict rule of all-encompassing sharia over every facet of human affairs, and, longer term, the restoration of the lands of the old Caliphate to Muslim dominion.

In their view, no sacrifice is too great to achieve those ends, and no violence is unjustified.

I don't think we have reached the point yet of widespread American understanding that the war is one of ultimates for us as well.

Dennis Mullin, who traveled widely in the Islamic world for 10 years as a foreign correspondent for U.S. News and World Report and other publications, wrote in the WaPo last year that "The present war is really a crusade" fought by Islam against the West- and non-Western non-Muslims.

The al Qaeda leader, in the "Letter to the American People" published last November and attributed to him, [made] very clear that bin Laden's ultimate goal is to undermine Western civilization in its totality, which strongly implies that even if Israel didn't exist, he would still be pursuing what is really, as reluctant as we are to say it, a religious crusade in the true historical sense.

Throughout history, disruption of the social and political order of the day has been a regular occurrence. But this is a different kind of fight, one with long roots in the past and one that will last long into the future. In the letter, bin Laden purportedly said, "it is to this religion that we call you," implying the need for a global theological upheaval. ...

Lest there be any doubt that what is going on now is a real crusade, and not just a protest against American hegemony, it is important to note that al Qaeda and other Muslim forces are now or have been engaged in conflicts not just against the West proper, but against Hindus in Kashmir and increasingly in other parts of India, as well as against Orthodox Russians in Chechnya. Moreover, the Muslim Uighurs are fighting the mostly Buddhist Chinese; and Muslims are doing battle in Indonesia and the Philippines. Hundreds were recently killed in Muslim-Christian violence in Nigeria over a beauty pageant (ironically won by a Turk, after it was moved to London). Muslim extremist cells are operating in scores of countries, and their cross-border cooperation in training and financing gives credence to the assumption that the driving force is not strictly localized grievances (witness Kenya, Bali) as much as a clarion call to a worldwide transnational Islamic revival. ...

Absent a true reformation within Islam itself (which seems increasingly unlikely), the frustration over the present and the dreams of past glory of the 7th century are manifested by a destructive effort to bring the rest of the world down to Islam's current level.

Our enemies wish us lethal harm, have present means to inflict it and are developing means to deliver mass destruction to our shores. There is a large, well-funded terrorist organization, active in many nations, possessed of men who will die to achieve their aims, which has already claimed the right to kill four million Americans. Sept. 11, 2001 proved that they have the will to do so. If Iran's mullahs or North Korea are not actual allies already, they will be, especially if we give them or their successors years and years to do so. The campaign against terrorism is foundationally a contest of wills - and dare I say it, a spiritual struggle.

The real issue is whether the Western Civilization shall prevail against the last vestige of medievalism; whether the rule of men who behead their prisoners, enslave their women and deny the rights of self-determination to their own people, shall kill us and displace us, to whom the individual and individual rights are sacred and whose laws require respect for freedom of conscience, freedom of religion and whose traditions preserve freedom from fear and cruelty. In the long history of civilization, this task is to be done now.

The danger of the "Ideal Time"

The ideological eschatology of the Western Left - why Islamofascism doesn't repel them

Eschatology is the theology of last things, the time when history reaches its final fulfillment. Of the world's great religions, only three are eschatological: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Christianity sprang from Judaism and Islam claims to be the true faith of revealed religion that Judaism and Christianity corrupted.

In all three religions the establishment of the end time is the establishment of the ideal time. It is when the present world is either destroyed so that perfect world can take its place, or the present world's corruption is excised and creation is purified and restored. Usually in Jewish thought, the ideal time has been the restoration of a free, independent Israel living righteously within the Sinai covenant. Jesus' disciples persistently asked Jesus when he was going to bring it about, to which Jesus basically replied, "God only knows."

The establishment of modern Israel did not fulfill this vision fully. The dream of the original Zionists was threefold: to establish and Jewish state that was (a) politically free within its borders, (b) independent of foreign control and (c) extant over all the lands of biblical Israel. To date, Israel has never achieved all three simultaneously.

Hence, there have been 12 attempts by Jewish terrorists to destroy the Muslim al-Aqsa mosque and Dome of the Rock, which sit atop the ruins of the ancient Jewish Temple. These Jewish eschatologists believe that there is a prophetic necessity to the rebuilding of the Temple, so the Muslim edifices there must be removed. This restoration dream is shared by many American evangelical Christians.

In Islam and most strains of Christianity, the ideal time is established after judgment of the dead and the living. The Apostles Creed (dating not to the apostles but to the end of the second century) says that Jesus will "return to judge the living and the dead." In Islam, of course, judgment is the sole prerogative of Allah, but many (maybe most) Muslims believe that Jesus will be assigned the task by Allah and will judge humanity as Allah's agent. In both Christianity and Islam, the ideal time includes no sinners, who are either excluded from entering the ideal community of righteousness or are simply destroyed. In either event, it is too late to convert once the judgment has begun.

When all three eschatologies are taken to the extreme, adherents deny the goodness and value of the present world. After all, why work to increase the value, beauty or goodness of the present world and its institutions if everything that now exists will be wiped away or transmuted by God anyway?

In more moderate practice, however, the desire for an ideal time is positive. It affirms what common sense and a glance at this morning's headlines reveal: there is something seriously wrong with the present order. Hence, it can impel adherents to avoid complacency in the face of evil, to work for the improvement of the human condition so better to prepare persons to face the coming judgment. Indeed, most Christians have held through two millennia to the idea that the Kingdom of God, preached by Jesus, is just as much a present spiritual state of community as a coming physical reality. The Kingdom is within us now, although we can never achieve it fully on our own efforts. Nonetheless, we must do the best we can.

In Christian history this understanding has led on the one hand to the monastic movements that sprang up in the early Middle Ages. Monasteries were strict communities of faith, set apart from the world (although not so separatist that their leaders eschewed commerce with the world). On the other hand it led to the 20th century's liberationist theologies, which paradoxically came to eschew eschatology altogether and focused solely on the reform and even overthrow of present political orders. (It can be argued, though, that liberationism was as much a product of The Communist Manifesto as the Bible.)

But eschatology becomes evil when its adherents see only their own purity and others' sin. When they see the present state of affairs - always of others' affairs - as wholly corrupt, godless and faithless, then it is a short step to religious radicalism, what we have come to call religious fascism. Examples given: the mullahcracy of Iran and Taliban Afghanistan, the latter internally cruel to the point of murder, oppressive and ruthlessly class-ridden, a sort of real-world Animal Farm , only infinitely bloodier.

If the eschatologists are both radicalized and evangelistic rather than monastic, then the result is holy war, jihad. Holy war focuses on destroying sinners, not converting them.

That is the state of al Qaeda and a great deal of the Muslim faithful today. Al Qaeda is actively jihadist, while many millions of other Muslims are sympathetically so. They seek to attain the ideal time - the true Islamic society. Never mind that millions of other Muslims have a different understanding of what Islamic society should be. The radicalized eschatologist simply can wrote them off as apostate and make war against them as readily as against infidels.

Non-religious westerners are just as liable to eschatological fervor as religious people anywhere. Marxism is an eschatological ideology (a godless religion in its own right, really). The ideal time is when "the workers control the means of production" after the capitalists have been violently overthrown. Lee Harris explained the basic tenets of Marxism, and its fundamental flaws, in his excellent essay, "The Intellectual Origins of America-Bashing." Suffice it to say here that Marx considered revolution by the oppressed both essential and inevitable for true socialism to be established. This was a political version of Judgment Day, when the wicked capitalists would be judged and destroyed so that the pure in heart (the heavily romanticized working classes) could attain the Ideal Time.

This appealing but basically foolish ideology held power in the USSR for 70 years, abandoned long before its end by almost all the working classes themselves and most of the ruling class. Soviet communism became a shell game in which commissars and higher ranks lived large and the masses merely lived. Its Ideal Time, however, was hammered home by the propagandists as just around the corner. True Communism was always coming soon, a state in which material production was so great that all human needs were met without shortage. Greed would therefore disappear and the inherent but capitalist-suppressed natural nobility of men and women would emerge. They would be transformed into true communists - altruists who worked each day for the good of the people, not for crass, selfish profit.

But, as Soviet army officer Victor Suvorov came to realize, in a True Communist society, who would stoop to volunteer to shovel manure?

But who will be busy in the sewers? Is it possible that there will be anybody who will say, 'Yes, this is my vocation, this is my place, I am not fit for anything better?'

Of course not. Despite this basic, and indeed obvious flaw, the Soviet promise of its Ideal Time enraptured enormous numbers of Western elites who should have known better.

The old USSR has gone the way of the dodo and hardly any die-hard true believers remain in its former states. But they remain in droves in the West, convinced that Western economic-political systems remain irredeemably corrupt. Having shunned Christian faith for some decades, Western ideologues also discarded a key thing that has prevented Christian eschatologists from experimenting with Taliban-style social orders: the New Testament formally denies the possibility of the self-perfectibility of the human person. (Christian oppressions and brutalities done for other reasons were bad enough, but only rarely, and on small scales, did Christians ever attempt to enforce an Idealized community by force or coercion.)

So the philosophical and ideological origin of the modern Left: Rejecting the idea of a divinely shaped world yet to come, but believing, all evidence to the contrary, that human beings are fundamentally good, most Western ideological eschatologists found a natural fit with Marxism-Leninism: the present order must pass away, and we can build something better on our own. The violent destruction of the present order, if necessary, had a natural fit with Marxism from the beginning.

The Left, rejecting as a basic tenet of its faith the major features of Western societies, came to romanticize heavily non-Western, non-capitalist cultures, especially those of the Third World. The village society became idealized, always assumed to be populated by selfless, caring people whose spirits (never souls, which might need saving!) were uninfected by the crass materialism of capitalism. This was their Eden, the Ideal Time from humankind had sprung; Marxism-Leninism provided the framework for transforming Western societies into a New Jerusalem. Over time, and not a very long time, the Left idealized anyone who opposed the West, no matter how cruel, oppressive or personally repulsive he might be: Castro, Che, Mao, Saddam and others. And now Osama.

That such figures murdered by the thousands or millions dismayed some of the Left, to be sure. But again, Marxist theory provided a way to rationalize the deaths: building the Ideal Community might well require bloodshed, and besides, such violence and oppressive structures were understood to be mere temporary expedients en route to the Ideal Time, when the inherent goodness of human beings would finally flower and coercion would no longer be necessary.

It must be pointed out that the Left, especially the Hard Left, was always mostly from the privileged classes of Western societies. In their dreams of an Ideal Time, they always remained in power. They saw as natural allies anyone who wished to overthrow the Western order, even if (especially if?) by hard violence. They were apparently oblivious to the fact that the others never saw them as allies, not even Stalin, who had moved firmly in eastern Europe to kill or imprison the homegrown communists there before they could get the foolish idea that they would have some say in the newly established workers' paradise.

The romantic thrall much of the Left has today with Islamism is little different than its swoon over Stalin, and no more moral. The Left never had the chance to enjoy the benefits of Stalin's rule and so never really understood that he considered them "useful idiots" to be eliminated if the Soviets ever occupied their countries. Likewise today, the Left, convinced of its own moral purity, fails to understand that al Qaeda views them with contempt equal to Stalin's, and considers them nothing more than infidels to be dealt with when the time comes.

Fortunately, though, there are some of the Left (or at least of liberals) who recognize the peril (link, link, for example) and we may pray others will awaken, too.

Update: Also read, "Mephisto," on Belmont Club. Also, I recommend reading "The Ideological War Within the West," by John Fonte, whichn helps illumine these concepts. Fonte "suggests there has arisen a conflict within the democratic world between liberal democracy and transnational progressivism, between democrats and what he calls post-democrats." Well worth the time.

See also, "Six fatal shortcomings of the modern Left," by Paul Berman, an old-style Leftist, Dissent Magazine, Winter 2004.