Monday, February 09, 2004

The Clash of Civilizations

Read these two quotes and let them sort of roll around in your brain for a few minutes:

Quote #1:

"''What if Mohamed Atta had been raised on soul-stretching questions instead of simple certitudes?''"

-Irshad Manji

Quote #2:

"I personally find when there's a confrontation between everything I love -- scientific inquiry, reason, cosmopolitanism, secularism, emancipation of women (and those are the things I love, by the way) -- and everything I hate -- Stone Age fascism, religious bullshit, and so on -- it's a no-brainer. I know exactly which side I'm on, and I knew right away. I felt exhilaration on the 11th of September, and I feel slightly ashamed to say that, in view of the fact that so many people lost their lives that day. But when the day was over, and I had been through the gamut of rage and disgust and nausea and so on -- not fear, I will claim for myself. I'm not afraid of people like that. I'm very angered by them. But there was something I hadn't analyzed when I went into in myself, and I was pleased to find it was exuberance. I thought, "Okay, right. I'll never get bored with fighting against these people." And their defeat will be absolute, it will be complete."

-Christopher Hitchens

I remember that same exuberance Christopher Hitchens refers to after 9/11. In those weeks after the tragedy, there was a vibe going around that we had to change the world to stop this from happening again. That was the exuberance. There was a sudden realization. Irshad Manji got it right; the problem with the Middle East is that their current culture is dominated by fundamentalist thinking that doesn't allow anything in the way of free and open thought. By definition fundamentalist cultures arbitarily set their own moral compass. Thus they can have no independant moral consciousness.

In a free and open society, free expression means that there is always a group of people who believe that the government, or even society in general, is wrong. This keeps the debate open at all times. The effect of this debate is the moral consciousness. We are often told of the value of concensus. The passing of the PATRIOT Act was concensus. A real moral compass emerges from debate.

I have no doubt that right about now some reader will exclaim, "Anthropic you idiot, Bush himself is a fundamentalist!". That's not the point. While I agree that we are not a society free of fundamentalist demons, there are several magnitudes of difference between having a few fundamentalist issues debated in your society and having fundamentalist values thurst upon every crevice of life. Remember, even as you read this there is someone arguing for the legalization of gay marriage or railing against the PATRIOT Act. Whatever failings America may have, the level of public debate today is high. A fundamentalist culture would not even allow such expression to exist.

This lack of expression, this lack of debate, makes fundamentalist-led cultures dangerous to modern societies. Thus, Christopher Hitchen's point up there. Islamic fundamentalists despise everything we stand for. If we want to peacefully co-exist with these people then the long-term solution, for the good of civilization, is to turn the Middle East around by opening up their culture.

At this point in the debate, someone always raises that dictum of political correctness: "We shouldn't be judging other cultures!" And the, I shake my head in disagreement. We should not be in the business of judging other cultures...But, when a culture thick with fundamentalist dogma lashes out as we saw on 9/11, they have judged themselves.

I should stress here that my comments should be read carefully. I am not saying we should destroy the Middle East. I am not saying that we should destroy Islam. I am not saying that the Middle East is inferior to our culture. I am saying that we should not tollerate fundamentalist cultures to lash out at us, and that if the world is ever going to grow more peaceful, we ahve to open up these cultures.

And that is what we are trying to do in Iraq. Iraqis in Baghdad are now going to Internet cafes. The price of goods has radically dropped. The process of opening up their culture has begun. The Iraqis are a strong, industrious people. Given a decade or so, they will thrive, and if we have succeeded, they will created a free, strong culture in the Middle East.

Let us not forget that Western culture was once ruled by fanatical fundamentalists and that there was a time when our cultural progenitors lashed out against more open cultures. That was the Crusades. And yet, today we can look back at the Crusades as insane. We can do that today because Western culture was brought kicking and screaming out of the Dark Ages by the great minds that drove the Rennaisance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment. From there, a more secular, a more sucessful, and more intellectual society grew.

It is clear though, that today we can not wait for analogies of those events to happen in the Middle East. In a world where we are all interdependant on each other to sustain our civilization(s), we cannot tolerate cultures that would create 9/11s. That is the reason why invading Iraq was justified. The flood of outside goods and ideas will envigorate Iraq. They can become the catalyst for change in the Middle East. The full impact of intervening in Iraq will take decades to mature.

The problem, of course, is that this line of thought has appeared nowhere in mainstream politcal thought. It would seem that most people view 9/11 as a crisis that has passed. You hear plenty of talk about the economy, you hear plenty of talk about gay marriage, and you hear plenty of talk about "WMD", that incidental dead-end of this whole debate. Where is the talk of 9/11? Perhaps Bush blew it. Perhaps people would rather not revisit the horrors of 9/11 in their minds. What scares me is that 9/11, a recent event that has to rank in the top 10 most important days in the history of America, is not even an issue in this year's presidental campaign. How is it that Vietnam has entered into nearly every discussion of American foreign policy since at least 1968, but 9/11 barely registers these days?

Well, I take that back...At least a few people realize the significance of 9/11. Here's how Christopher Hitchens answered when Tavis Smiley recently asked him if President Bush deserves to be reelected:

"[sighs] Well, it's a tough call for me. I wasn't-I certainly wasn't for his election the first time round. I didn't want Albert Gore, either, and I'm glad it wasn't Gore, by the way. One has to face that fact. I must say I'm a bit of a single issue voter on this. I want to be absolutely certain that there's a national security team that wakes up every morning wondering how to take the war to the enemy. I don't have that confidence about any of the Democratic candidates, but I think that a Kerry-Edwards ticket would be made up of people who have shown that they are serious on this point, yeah. So I'm not dogmatically for the reelection of the President, but I'm for applying that test as a voter."

-Christopher Hitchens

I've got to say that is precisely where I stand as well. I disagree with much of Bush's domestic policy, and the specter of pissing on the Constitution with a ammendment banning gay marriage is abhorant to me. However, post-9/11, the question of "how to take the war to the enemy" is THE issue for me. I will probably not decide who I vote for until I fill out my ballot, but that issue will weigh heavily in my mind when I do.